Monday, May 04, 2009

Noteworthy

President Obama has a lot on his plate with 2 wars, a housing crisis, bank failures, massive unemployment, problems with domestic automakers, etc., etc., etc. With the H1N1 flu (swine) hitting various states, the federal response has been excellent in keeping Americans informed. However, I personally think that the media went overboard in their reporting of this latest flu. They made people panic unnecessarily. Despite the fact that the President has be inundated with problems left behind by the previous administration, he has done a great job working through it all.

> Today is the 39th anniversary (May 4, 1970) of the Kent State shootings by the Ohio National Guard. I was a freshman at the Ohio State University when the killings happened. It is a day that I will never forget.

> Bloomberg is reporting this morning that the President has some other plans:

President Barack Obama will propose today to outlaw three offshore tax-avoidance techniques U.S. companies such as Caterpillar Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. want to use to save $190 billion over the next decade and make it riskier for Americans to stash money in tax-haven banks.

Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will target a strategy that allows U.S.-based multinational companies to effectively hide from the Internal Revenue Service the role their foreign subsidiaries play in shifting profits into low-tax jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands, an administration official said.

The proposal, affecting tax rules known as “check the box,” would net $86.5 billion in revenue between 2011-2019 by overhauling regulations created in Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration and later written into law by a Republican- controlled Congress after Clinton tried to withdraw the rules.....

This would certainly pull in money for the treasury.