ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO, - MyFox (New York)
Stephan: Even though I support discouraging tobacco, while permitting its usage that isn't what strikes me about this.
We, as a society, can agree to alter individual behavior, through taxation policy, and corporations the Supreme Court tells us are as people. Yet we choose not to exert similar controls on the corporate Virtual States. Why? Because they have the funds to purchase the government they want. What the Gulf Crisis shows us that we must change our policies to make this impossible or, at least more difficult, or this is only going to get worse. The Gulf Disaster is the destination to which our current path leads.
Ten dollars (or more) for a pack of cigarettes? It might soon become a reality in many stores in New York City.
The cigarette tax in New York will jump $1.60 a pack under a deal struck between Governor David Paterson and state government leaders.
The proposal is part of an emergency budget bill that the Legislature approved Monday evening.
In the city, which levies steep taxes of its own on tobacco products, a pack of cigarettes would come with a tax of $5.85, making it the nation’s first city to break $5.
The Paterson administration hopes the proposal would generate $440 million in revenue this year, which would be a help close the state budget gap which is estimated to be over $9 billion. Despite the dire budget situation there is no guarantee that the emergency bill will pass after Republicans threatened to vote against a bill that includes tax increases.
By at least one estimate, half the cigarettes consumed in New York are purchased from Native Americans who don’t collect and pay state taxes. A new proposal would attempt to limit the number of cigarettes purchased from tribes.
Some critics say that the plan sets up conflicts between the state and tribes.
Sen. George Maziarz, […]
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TOM MURPHY, Business Writer - The Associated Press
Stephan: Think about this: the insurance companies are going to get millions of new insurees, which should make prices go down. Yet they are going up. Our recovery demands that we develop a realistic life-affirming healthcare system, to replace the illness profit industry.
People who buy their own health insurance have been hit lately with premium hikes that far exceed increases in premiums for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The nonprofit foundation, which is separate from health insurer Kaiser Permanente, said recent premium hikes requested by insurers for individual coverage averaged 20 percent. Some customers were able to switch plans and pay less, so people paying on their own actually wound up paying 13 percent more on average.
That tops last year’s average 5 percent annual increase for employer-sponsored family coverage and almost unchanged premiums for employer-sponsored single coverage, though foundation Vice President Gary Claxton said the comparisons come with qualifications.
The individual insurance survey asked respondents for their most recent premium increases, and those can happen more or less frequently than the annual increases mostly seen in the group market, he noted.
In the online poll, Kaiser queried 1,038 randomly selected people who pay for their own coverage.
Individual health insurance premiums generally rise faster than group coverage rates. They can be affected by variables like a person’s age. They also can be affected by rising medical and drug costs and are more vulnerable when a bad economy makes […]
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Stephan: You just couldn't write this in a novel. What are we doing, what have we been doing, and why do we keep doing it?
TOKYO — Afghan President Hamid Karzai prepared to wrap up a five-day visit to Japan on Sunday after pledging the host nation would be granted priority to explore and extract untapped mineral resources recently valued at more than $1 trillion.
Karzai said the leg up in mineral exploration would be granted in return for the aid Japan has given his nation.
‘Morally, Afghanistan should give access as a priority to those countries that have helped Afghanistan massively in the past few years,’ he said, noting Japan has been his country’s No. 2 aid donor.
‘What . . . we have to reciprocate with is this opportunity of mineral resources, that we must return at the goodwill of the Japanese people by giving Japan priority to come and explore and extract,’ he said.
Karzai’s remarks were made Friday in a Tokyo meeting organized by the Japan Institute of International Affairs and reported in The Japan Times and other media.
Minerals valued
Geologists have known for decades about Afghanistan’s vast deposits of iron, copper, cobalt and gold.
The U.S. Department of Defense this week put a nearly $1 trillion price tag on the reserves, but Afghanistan’s Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani called that a conservative estimate. He said he’s […]
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PETER BAKER and MARK LANDLER, - The New York Times
Stephan:
Within the administration, the troubles in clearing out the Taliban from a second-tier region and the elusive loyalties of the Afghan president have prompted anxious discussions about whether the policy can work on the timetable the president has set. Even before the recent setbacks, the military was highly skeptical of setting a date to start withdrawing, but Mr. Obama insisted on it as a way to bring to conclusion a war now in its ninth year.
For now, the White House has decided to wait until a review, already scheduled for December, to assess whether the target date can still work. But officials are emphasizing that the July 2011 withdrawal start will be based on conditions in the country, and that the president has yet to decide how quickly troops will be pulled out.
Even if some troops do begin coming home then, the officials said that it may be a small number at first. Given that he has tripled the overall force since taking office, Mr. Obama could still end his term with more forces in Afghanistan than when he began it.
‘Things are not looking good,
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RICHARD MAUER and ANNA M. TINSELY, - McClatchy Newspapers
Stephan:
ANCHORAGE — The causes of the disastrous blowout and gas explosion on BP’s leased Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico are a long way from being determined.
Yet already BP’s actions are facing unprecedented scrutiny, thanks to a years-long history of legal and ethical violations that critics, judges and members of Congress say shows that the London-based company has a penchant for putting profits ahead of just about everything else.
Over the past two decades, BP subsidiaries have been convicted three times of environmental crimes in Alaska and Texas, including two felonies. It remains on probation for two of them.
It also has received the biggest ever fine for willful work safety violations in U.S. history and is the subject of a wide range of safety investigations, including one in Washington State that resulted last week in a relatively minor $69,000 fine for 13 ‘serious’ safety violations at its Cherry Point refinery near Ferndale, Wash.
While BP has said it accepts responsibility for the spill, it denies that it’s guilty of a systematic pattern of safety and environmental failures.
‘We are a responsible and professional company,’ said BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart. ‘We work to high standards. Safety is our highest […]
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