20 Jun 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fails to qualify for CNN’s debate. It’ll be a showdown between Biden and Trump

by | posted in: News | 0

By MEG KINNARD (Associated Press)

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has failed to qualify for next week’s debate in Atlanta, according to host network CNN, falling shy of benchmarks both for state ballot qualification and necessary polling.

The missed markers mean that the June 27 showdown will be solely between Democratic President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. That denies Kennedy a singular opportunity to stand alongside the leading candidates in an attempt to lend legitimacy to his longshot bid and convince potential supporters that he has a shot at winning.

Both the Biden and Trump campaigns fear that Kennedy could play spoiler in what’s anticipated to be a close general election.

According to the criteria set out by CNN, candidates would be invited to participate in the debate if they had secured a place on the ballot in states totaling at least 270 votes in the Electoral College, the minimum needed to win the presidency.

Biden and Trump have easily cleared the polling threshold but won’t be certified for the ballot until their parties formally nominate them later this summer. Both have secured enough delegates to lock in their nominations.

Kennedy’s campaign says he has satisfied the requirements to appear on the ballot in 22 states, with a combined 310 electoral votes, though not all have affirmed his name will be listed. California, the largest prize on the electoral map with 54 votes, will not certify any candidates until Aug. 29.

Candidates were also required to reach a polling threshold of 15% in four reliable national polls by June 20, another metric CNN said Kennedy failed to meet. According to the network, Kennedy has received at least 15% in three qualifying polls so far and is currently on the ballot in six states, making him currently eligible for 89 Electoral College votes.

Last month, Kennedy filed an election complaint alleging CNN is colluding with Biden and Trump to exclude him from the June 27 debate, alleging that the participation requirements were designed to ensure only Biden and Trump would qualify and claiming that he is being held to a higher standard.

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CNN has said the complaint is without merit. Kennedy’s campaign did not immediately respond to a message Thursday seeking comment on CNN’s announcement and asking if he planned to take any further action about his exclusion.

Last month, Biden and Trump agreed to the CNN debate and a second on Sept. 10 hosted by ABC, bypassing the nonpartisan commission that has organized debates for nearly four decades.

After winning a coin toss, Biden’s campaign chose the right podium position, meaning that he will be on the right side of viewers’ screens, with Trump on the left, according to CNN. Trump’s campaign then opted to deliver his closing statement after Biden.

Both campaigns have agreed to appear at podiums, and microphones will be muted except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak.

20 Jun 2024

Bret Stephens: How capitalism went off the rails

by | posted in: Politics | 0

The Group of 7 countries might have set a record when they met in Italy last week. Has there ever been a less popular assemblage of leaders of the free world? Approval ratings ranged from Giorgia Meloni of Italy’s about 40% to Emmanuel Macron of France’s 21% to Fumio Kishida of Japan’s 13%. Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20% of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years. Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity? Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International and a Financial Times columnist, has an answer that boils down to two words: easy money. In an eye-opening new book, “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” he makes a convincing case.

“When the price of borrowing money is zero,” Sharma told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.” To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980, they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.

First, there was inflation in real and financial assets, followed by inflation in consumer prices, followed by higher financing costs as interest rates have risen to fight inflation — which inevitably begets political pressure to return to easy-money policies.

For wealthier Americans who own assets or had locked in low-interest mortgages, this hasn’t been a bad thing. But for Americans who rely heavily on credit, it’s been devastating. “For families already strained by high prices, dwindling savings and slowing wage growth, increased borrowing costs are pushing them closer to the financial edge,” The New York Times’ Ben Casselman and Jeanna Smialek reported in May.

Sharma noted more subtle damages. Since investors “can’t make anything on government bonds when those yields are near zero,” he said, “they take bigger risks, buying assets that promise higher returns, from fine art to high-yield debt of zombie firms, which earn too little to make even interest payments and survive by taking on new debt.” A recent Associated Press analysis found 2,000 of those zombies (once thought to be mainly a Japanese phenomenon) in the United States. Collectively, those companies have a total of $1.1 trillion in loans to pay between now and September.

The hit to the overall economy comes in other forms, too: inefficient markets that no longer deploy money carefully to their most productive uses, large corporations swallowing smaller competitors and deploying lobbyists to bend government rules in their favor, the collapse of prudential economic practices. “The most successful investment strategy of the 2010s,” Sharma writes, citing podcaster Joshua Brown, “would have been to buy the most expensive tech stocks and then buy more as they rose in price and valuation.”

But the worst hit is to capitalism itself: a pervasive and well-founded sense that the system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”

The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.

Sharma is no fan of Bidenomics, which, he told me, took “the 100-year expansion of government and put it in overdrive” with unprecedented stimulus packages and politically directed investments. But unlike other prominent Wall Street investors, he isn’t signing up for the Donald Trump bandwagon, either. The former president loves easy money, tax cuts without spending cuts and record deficits.

“He promised to deconstruct the administrative state but ended up adding new rules at the same pace as his predecessor — 3,000 a year,” Sharma said of Trump. “His exercise of presidential authority to personal ends shattered historic precedents and did more to expand than restrict the scope of government. For all their policy differences, both leading U.S. candidates are committed and fearless statists, not friends of competitive capitalism.”

What happens when both major parties are wedded to two versions of the same failing ideas? And what happens when leading figures of both the progressive left and the populist right seek to compound the problem with even easier credit and more runaway spending?

The answer: We are wandering in fog. And the precipice is closer than we think.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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20 Jun 2024

Supreme Court upholds a tax on foreign income over a business-backed challenge

by | posted in: Adventure | 0

By MARK SHERMAN (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a tax on foreign income over a challenge backed by business and anti-regulatory interests, declining their invitation to weigh in on a broader, never-enacted tax on wealth.

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, left in place a provision of a 2017 tax law that is expected to generate $340 billion, mainly from the foreign subsidiaries of domestic corporations that parked money abroad to shield it from U.S. taxes.

The law, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by then-President Donald Trump, includes a provision that applies to companies that are owned by Americans but do their business in foreign countries. It imposes a one-time tax on investors’ shares of profits that have not been passed along to them, to offset other tax benefits.

But the larger significance of the ruling is what it didn’t do. The case attracted outsize attention because some groups allied with the Washington couple who brought the case argued that the challenged provision is similar to a wealth tax, which would apply not to the incomes of the very richest Americans but to their assets, like stock holdings, that now get taxed only when they are sold.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his majority opinion that “nothing in this opinion should be read to authorize any hypothetical congressional effort to tax both an entity and its shareholders or partners on the same undistributed income realized by the entity.”

The court ruled in the case of Charles and Kathleen Moore, of Redmond, Washington. They challenged a $15,000 tax bill based on Charles Moore’s investment in an Indian company, arguing that the tax violates the 16th Amendment. Ratified in 1913, the amendment allows the federal government to impose an income tax on Americans. Moore said in a sworn statement that he never received any money from the company, KisanKraft Machine Tools Private Ltd.

A ruling for the Moores could have called into question other provisions of the tax code and threatened losses to the U.S. Treasury of several trillion dollars, the Biden administration told the court.

The case also had kicked up ethical concerns and raised questions about the story the Moores’ lawyers told in court filings. Justice Samuel Alito rejected calls from Senate Democrats to step away from the case because of his ties to David Rivkin, a lawyer who is representing the Moores.

Public documents show that Charles Moore’s involvement with the company, including serving as a director for five years, is far more extensive than court filings indicate.

The case is Moore v. U.S., 22-800.

___

20 Jun 2024

Regan Smith qualifies first in 200 fly at Olympic Trials, final is tonight

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INDIANAPOLIS — Regan Smith of Lakeville followed her record-breaking performance in the 100-meter backstroke final on Tuesday night with a strong effort in the prelims of the 200 butterfly at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials on Wednesday.

Smith, 22, posted the fastest qualifying time in the 200 fly in 2 minutes, 4.91 seconds. Her qualifying time was 1.19 seconds faster than the next best time by Alex Shackell.

Smith set a world record in her specialty, the 100 backstroke, on Tuesday night, with her time of 57.13 seconds easily beating the mark of 57.33 set a year ago by Australia’s Kaylee McKeown.

It all sets up a busy Thursday for Smith. She’ll swim in the 200 backstroke prelims in the morning, and the 200 butterfly is the first final of the night Session.

The 200 backstroke final is Friday night.

Smith could finish the trials with a flourish after an impressive but ultimately disappointing start. On Monday, she registered the fifth-fastest all-time performance in the 100 butterfly in 55.62 seconds but finished third behind Gretchen Walsh and Torri Huske to miss an Olympic berth in the event.

Coming back from lengthy layoffs, American swimming stars Caeleb Dressel and Simone Manuel were eager to claim their first individual events of the Paris Olympics.

Instead, they had to settle for supporting roles.

Dressel finished third in the men’s 100-meter freestyle on Wednesday night, while Manuel touched fourth in the women’s 100 free.

Only the top two will get to swim the events individually in Paris, but Dressel and Manuel will both be part of the 4×100 freestyle relays.

“I think Paris is going to be a blast,” said Manuel, who has endured a long road back after being diagnosed with overtraining syndrome ahead of the Tokyo Games. “It’s a different spot than I’m used to right now with only being a relay swimmer. But it’s my third Olympic team and that’s something that’s really hard to accomplish.”

Potential breakout star Kate Douglass claimed the victory and Huske took the runner-up position, with Walsh also finishing ahead of Manuel.

Dressel, the winner of five gold medals in Tokyo, won’t get a chance to defend his 100 freestyle title after reaching the wall behind Chris Guiliano and Jack Alexy.

“I’m trying to have fun; I am having fun,” Dressel told the crowd of 22,209 on the deck of the temporary pool inside Lucas Oil Stadium. “You don’t know how much it means to me, the love I’m getting from you. It’s been tough.”

Dressel walked away from swimming in the midst of the 2022 world championships, later revealing that he needed an extended break to rediscover his love of the sport.

Dressel failed to even qualify for the 2023 worlds, but his times have improved significantly since last fall. He still has a shot to qualify individually in the 50 freestyle and 100 butterfly — two more events he won at the last Summer Games.

Manuel also has the 50-meter freestyle left on her plate.

In perhaps the surest bet of the meet, Katie Ledecky claimed her third victory with another dominating performance in the 1,500 freestyle, though the time was a bit of a disappointment.

Seventeen-year-old Thomas Heilman won the men’s 200 butterfly, while Matt Fallon touched first in the 200 breaststroke. Both will be first-time Olympians.

Dressel was all smiles as he hugged the guys ahead of him, saying he was pleased to be on the relay that will set its sights on taking down the world record at the Olympics.

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