Rangel is history. Pelosi is just delaying it for a day or two. He's done!!! House Republican's are to introduce legislation tomorrow to remove Rangel, and many Democrats are expected to support this. It's just a matter of time. If they allow Rangel to stay on, there won't be any Democrats left after the November elections.
they never fell for his crap in the first place because he was never voted in...Blair was, Brown took over halfway through the term. Demoncracy in the UK!
Well I think the rules state that Stark will take over on a temporary basis. I sure hope it's not made permanent. Let's just hope Stark doesn't try and push the FTT through the committee or something crazy. -Guru
Rangel's replacement: Pete Stark http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/33845.html California Rep. Pete Stark â a controversial lawmaker who has a history of volatile comments about Republicans â is now chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, automatically moving up from the second slot after New York Democrat Charles Rangel relinquished his gavel Wednesday morning. It would take an affirmative action of the House to remove Stark and replace him with another member of the Ways and Means Committee, according to aides familiar with House operations. Stark's ascension does make sense as chairman from a policy standpoint: The biggest item on the committee's plate right now is the president's health care overhaul, and Stark has been chairman of the panel's subcommittee on health. If Pelosi hopes to keep Stark in place until the end of this Congress, there's little that critics could do other than complain. But congressional observers believe that if Democrats hold their majority there will be a battle for the Ways and Means gavel in the next Congress, which meets in January. -Guru
From the sounds of it we're stuck with Pete Stark as Chairman of the Ways and Means until the end of the year (unless Pelosi acts to have him replaced). If Dem's retained the house then there would be a bunch of folks gunning for the position and if the Repub's win then I believe they would name a new chairman? Either way it's doubtful Stark will be Chairman past the end of this year. I guess we'll have to wait and see what he does in that role. I would think he will probably try and advance Defazio's bill out of committe. Does anyone remember how many Dems signed onto that "NO" letter for the FTT bill? -Guru
It sounds like Pelosi has just officially decided to support Stark: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/8...ns-gavel-while-ethics-investigation-continues Speaker Nancy Pelosi has picked liberal firebrand Rep. Pete Stark to replace ousted Chairman Charles Rangel on the tax-writing committee, according to a House leadership aide. The decision was made during a Wednesday morning leadership meeting following Rangel's announcement that he would temporarily step aside as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the aide said.
It doesn't matter what Stark does, as a FTT proposal wouldn't pass the Senate. The Republicans would be able to filibuster and stop it. Since the Democrats are using reconciliation to pass health care, they can not use this procedure again until next year. By January 2011, the House and Senate will have a significant number of Republicans, so Stark won't be able to get a transaction tax proposal passed, either this year, next year, etc....... *The reconciliation process can only be used once a year.
... and that is the main reason why the "charities" ask for even more of the fund investors money. Gordon the Alleged Furniture Kicking Bully needs some image softening, so he is hijacking good causes for his own promotional purposes. Because the UK charitable industry does not need triple-digit billion amounts. It needs as little as 0.5% of that $400 bn (0.0047=(11%*GBP10bn*1.7)/$400bn) to plug its current funding deficit. According to the recent BBC Radio 4 report analyzing the relationship between charity organisations and the media (an Archive on 4 programme called "Please Give Generously"), the UK charities run a GBP10bn per year industry, which currently has a mere 11% funding gap, indicating a quite stable revenue base (most of their benefactors being elderly females). The existing UK Robbin' Hoodie tax, which raises GBP 3-4 bn a year (nearly half of that from abroad) could grow the UK charitable industry revenues by 30%, if Gordon was kind enough to keep his promises - and he should be asked to do so, as soon as their campaign to extend his Duty to the entire world fails. But that viral video would have to be modified a bit, given that banks are exempt from Stamp Duty Reserve Tax. Foreign and UK investors, plus some little old ladies... no, these guys are not photogenic at all! Before the alliance with Gordon the Alleged Bully, charities have not even dreamt of such sums. No, their ambitions used to be much more modest, an order of magnitude smaller, motivated not by revenge or 1930's-style success envy, but by pragmatic revenue raising attemps and thus were co-operative, low-impact, as volume-neutral as possible. Charities were not millitant before their pact with Brown. Their least incompetent researcher (and probably least biased too), R. Schmidt, in his 2007 report for the North-South Institute (a Canadian NGO whose "research supports global efforts to [..] improve international financial systems and institutions", which is an euphemistic way of stating "wants to put the Tobin tax on the G7 agenda"), analyzed a narrow currency-only transaction tax (i.e. planning to tax one of the two markets excluded by DeFazio proposal - here's an international consistency for you). Assuming that all currency market participants pay the full cost of the bid-ask spread (as opposed to earning it in their capacity of dealers/MMs), and assuming that no untaxed substitutes exist for spot currencies (such as futures and ETFs), Schmidt (2007) finds that that a CTT rate of 0.00005 would be nearly volume-neutral, reducing foreign exchange transaction volumes by "only" 14%. However, such volume-neutral Tobin tax would raise relatively little revenue, estimated at around $33 bn annually, i.e. an order of magnitude less than the "carbon tax [which] has by far the greatest revenue-raising potential, estimated at $130-750 bn anually". Notice that their own most competent researcher did not recommend the FTT option at all! So the NGOs used to ask for less than 10% (33/400) of what they demand now that they teamed up with Gordon. And even though they lack any research to back it up, not only peer-reviewed, but even internal, they extended their tax to other instruments. And here lies their gravest error - their tax rates for non-currency instruments are totally arbitrary, nowhere near as carefully chosen as that of Schmidt (2007) for currencies. While a 0.00005 rate for currencies could be arguably sustained by some retail traders (who have to pay such spreads, unlike dealers, who earn them, and would just add the tax to the spreads), the 0.5% tax rate for stocks, which has been simply copied from the existing UK Stamp Duty rate, is a vast overestimate, nowhere near volume neutrality. Even without any econometric modelling one can notice that retail brokerage fees start in the US from as low as 1 USD per 200-share transaction, so given that a typical US stock is priced at around 35 USD, the FTT tax rate for US stocks transactions, which would be comparable with the current level of retail transaction costs, must not exceed 0.014%. A tax revenue based on this estimate (around $14 billion dollars anually from US stocks transactions) would be however similar to the total amount of transaction costs paid by investors to the entire US securities industry, which as a whole earns around $19 billion anually in commission revenues from exchange-traded products (according to SIFMA). So in other words, that "tiny" 0.014% FFT tax on stocks would be equivalent to a 75% tax on the brokerage industry revenues from commissions (not profits!), But that's not what the Robin Hood campaign proposed... they wanted 35 times more! - their unsubstantiated (even by internal research) tax rate for stocks was a staggering 0.5% (without any exemptions for derivatives). How likely is a competitive industry to raise its prices by 3500%? I'd say not very.