| How the grand plan to fight blight meandered
MAYOR STREET'S idea for remaking Philadelphia neighborhoods was an ambitious vision, the biggest of his eight years in office. But mayors don't rule by fiat. Street had to turn his ideas into a workable plan, get broad community and political support and then convince a balky bureaucracy to do the work. None of this came easy. He didn't involve a majority of City Council members in the planning stages. Some members fought him for two years before the program began. As a result, the original plans for a Neighborhood Transformation Initiative - including massive demolition of blighted buildings, acquisition of large tracts of land and a re-engineering of city building programs - gave way to less of all that. Street also decided to use relatively expensive NTI bond money to offset, or "backfill," the continuing loss of federal funding for existing housing programs.
January 2008 - Posts
Should be interesting to see how much pickup this little story gets. Apparently Mike Huckabee backers raised a reported $111,000 during a ministers' conference hosted by Kenneth Copeland Ministries in Newark, Texas. This could be problematic for two reasons. Read More... .
Senate economic plan would add jobless aid, rebates for high earners ...
Provided that President Bush quickly signs the legislation, Americans could start receiving rebate checks in May, with the bulk expected to arrive in June. The measure would make individuals with annual incomes of up to $150,000 and couples with incomes up to $300,000 eligible for the rebates _ limits twice as high as the plan the House passed on Tuesday. It also would expand rebate eligibility to 20 million older Americans on Social Security and to disabled veterans, and provide an unemployment extension for those whose benefits have run out. "It helps seniors and it helps those hit hardest by the economic downturn," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., the plan's author. The Senate Finance Committee approved the measure on a bipartisan vote Wednesday.
Market Insider/Wednesday Look Ahead
Now that the Fed has acted, earnings news comes back to the fore as investors look ahead to Wednesday's Wall Street open. Of course, the big debate in the markets remains focused on the Fed's next move. But those disappointing Apple earnings comments from Tuesday's after hours and another batch of preopening earnings reports could help influence the tone. Tuesday's session was one that investors will long remember. The Fed's extraordinary preopening announcement that it was cutting rates by an unprecedented 3/4 point stemmed what easily could have been a 500 or 600 decline in the Dow Industrials. Instead the Dow recovered well more than 300 points after a big early dip, closing off just 128 points. The S&P 500 was down 15 points, or 1.1 percent to 1310. The Nasdaq was off 47.75 points, or 2 percent, bringing it 19.8 percent below its October highs.
Cheap labor proving to be very costly
Those who favor continuing to allow illegal aliens to flood into the U.S. regularly tout our supposed need for “cheap labor" as the primary justification for ignoring our immigration laws. Unfortunately, for U.S. taxpayers this “cheap labor" is proving to be incredibly expensive.Earlier this year, Robert Rector and his colleagues at the Heritage Foundation sought to quantify the burden that is being imposed on American taxpayers by the 12 to 17 million illegals that currently reside in this country. Rector's research revealed that a household headed by an individual without a high school education, which included about two-thirds of the illegal alien population, costs U.S. taxpayers more than $32,000 in federal, state and local benefits. Granted, such a family would presumably pay some level of taxes, but the average of $9,000 a year paid in taxes by such families will result in a net tax burden or $22,449 per illegal alien household per year.
Getting the money right
For most people, buying a house involves a double financial whammy. First you have to assemble a pile of cash for the down payment and closing costs. Then you must convince a bank to lend you an even more staggering sum - generally 80 percent or more of the purchase price. So your first step, even before you start the actual hunt for a property, should be to get your financial house in order. .
Financial Sector Credit
Britons' inflation expectations rose to the highest in at least eight years in a Bank of England survey last month, making it harder for the central bank to lower interest rates further after the first cut since 2005. Consumers predict prices will increase 3% in the next 12 months, the highest median forecast since the report started in 1999..." December 13 - Bloomberg (Svenja O'Donnell): "U.K. real-estate agents and surveyors became the most pessimistic about house prices since at least 1998 last month as a property-market decline spread to London, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said." December 13 - Associated Press: "Inflation in Ireland rose last month to 5.0% -- the highest rate in Western Europe -- on the back of higher fuel and food prices...
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