iBankCoin
Home / 2011 / November (page 8)

Monthly Archives: November 2011

FLASH: CHINA’S QUARRY, AUSTRALIA, UPGRADED TO AAA by FITCH

Australia is regarded as one of the world’s safest borrowers, after a global ratings agency upgraded the country to the highest possible rating for its overseas borrowings.

Fitch Ratings upgraded Australia’s foreign currency issuer default rating to AAA from AA+, joining Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s in giving Australia the highest possible rating.

Full article

Comments »

C’mon Man

Just saw this on the Monday night pregame show, LOL. I wouldn’t want to mess with the guy on the left.

Comments »

Canada to Pull Out of Kyoto Protocol Next Month

CTVNews.ca Staff

Date: Sun. Nov. 27 2011 10:08 PM ET

Canada will announce next month that it will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, CTV News has learned.

The Harper government has tentatively planned an announcement for a few days before Christmas, CTV’s Roger Smith reported Sunday evening.

The developments come as Environment Minister Peter Kent prepares for a climate conference in Durban, South Africa that opens on Monday, with delegates from 190 countries seeking a new international agreement for cutting emissions.

Issues on the agenda include extending the Kyoto emission targets, a move being championed by Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate secretariat.

Kent said in the House of Commons on Nov. 22 he won’t sign a document at the Durban conference that extends the Kyoto targets.

“Canada goes to Durban with a number of countries sharing the same objective, and that is to put Kyoto behind us,” Kent said.

NDP environment critic Megan Leslie called the government’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto accord “disappointing.”

“It’s a really cynical and it’s a really cowardly move,” Leslie told CTV News.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May called the move “a very damaging act of sabotage.”

“It will reverberate around the world,” May told CTV. “Canada will be a pariah globally if it goes through with this.”

The accord is set to expire next year.

Kent told The Canadian Press that the Kyoto Protocol is out of date because it excludes major emitters among developing nations, including China, India and Brazil.

He also said that previous governments had failed to devise a strategy to hit the accord’s targets.

Those targets are now out of reach, and the Conservative government has set other, more modest targets while vowing to press the big polluters among developing nations to sign a deal with their own emissions-reduction targets.

Kent told CP in an interview ahead of the Durban conference that Canada will play hardball with developing countries to get an agreement during the climate talks.

Kent said developing countries should not be allowed to use the emissions records of wealthy nations as an excuse not to agree to lofty emissions-reduction targets.

He also said that all nations must be prepared to demonstrate their progress on whatever emissions targets are contained in any new deal.

Delegates at the conference will also be hammering out the details of a plan to administer the Green Climate Fund, money that is to help poor countries deal with climate change.

The fund is expected to grow over the next eight years to eventually distribute about $100 billion a year. However, it is still unclear where all of that money will come from and how it will be distributed.

Read the rest here.

Comments »

Dems Grab on to #OWS Meme

They will incorporate income inequality into their campaign mantra. Perhaps they should shell out some personal wealth for the 99%.

Full article

Comments »

#OWS Entitlements, Not Tax Cuts, Widen the Wealth Gap

Michael Barone

November 28, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Taxing high earners won’t make the poor less poor.

What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn’t include such tax increases.

Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.

They didn’t make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That’s despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.

Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.”

In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don’t pay income taxes but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.

The Democrats, perhaps following the polls and focus groups, have been protecting these entitlement programs, which have done more to increase income inequality than the Reagan and Bush tax cuts put together.

Ryan makes three more points that may strike many as counterintuitive.

First, reductions in some transfer payments haven’t hurt the living standards of most low-earners. The prime example is the welfare reform act of 1996, which reduced transfers to single mothers but induced many of them to find jobs that left them better off economically and, probably, psychologically.

Second, Americans aren’t trapped in one segment of the income distribution. A Tax Journal analysis of individual income-tax returns found that 58 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income segment by 2005. This comports with common experience. We move up and down the income scale in the course of a lifetime.

Read the rest here.

Comments »

New Satellite Data Turns Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory Upside Down

***Turns out this John O’Sullivan is purposefully deceptive, can’t read well, doesn’t understand Japanese, or all three. My apologies for posting a bunk piece of crap disguised as something legitimate*** Wood.

By: John O’Sullivan

Industrialized nations emit far less carbon dioxide than the Third World, according to latest evidence from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Global warming alarmism is turned on its head and the supposed role of carbon dioxide in climate change may be wrong, if the latest evidence from Japan’s scientists is to be believed.

Japanese national broadcaster, NHK World broke the astonishing story on their main Sunday evening news bulletin (October 30, 2011). Television viewers learned that the country’s groundbreaking IBUKU satellite, launched in June 2009, appears to have scorched an indelible hole in conventional global warming theory.

Standing in front of a telling array of colorful graphs, sober-suited Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies told viewers, “The [IBUKU satellite] map is to help us discover how much each region needs to reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions.”

Industrialized Nations World’s Lowest CO2 ‘Polluters’

Indeed, the map at which JAXA spokesman Sasano was pointing been expected by most experts to show that western nations are to blame for substantial increases in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, causing global warming. But to an officious looking TV interviewer Sasano turned greenhouse gas theory on it’s head.

According to UN science the greenhouse gas theory says more CO2 entering the atmosphere will warm the planet, while less CO2 is associated with cooling.

Gesturing to an indelible deep green hue streaked across the United States and Europe viewers were told, “in the high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere emissions were less than absorption levels.”

Sasano proceeded to explain the color-coding system of the iconic maps showing where regions were either absorbing or emitting the trace atmospheric gas. Regions were alternately colored red (for high CO2 emission), white (low or neutral CO2 emissions) and green (no emissions: CO2 absorbers).

Bizarrely, the IBUKU maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations revealing that the least industrialized regions are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet.

Yes, you read that correctly: the U.S. and western European nations are areas where CO2 levels are lowest. This new evidence defies the consensus view promoted by mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had long claimed that, “there is a consensus among scientists that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are harming global climate.”

The Japanese satellite map shows regions colored the deepest leaf green (net absorbers of CO2) being predominantly those developed nations of Europe and North America; thus indicating built up environments absorbed more CO2 than they emitted into the atmosphere.

By contrast the bulk of the regions colored red (so-called ‘carbon polluters’) were in undeveloped, densely forested equatorial regions of Africa and South America.

Huge Headache for Climate Policymakers

JAXA boasts that, “we can reduce the error of the estimated values when we introduce IBUKI’s observation data compared to that of the values calculated in a conventional way based on ground observation data.”

To all policymakers who study the Japanese maps it is apparent that the areas of greatest CO2 emissions are those regions with least human development and most natural vegetation: Equatorial Third World nations.

The Japanese evidence also disproves the often-cited hypothesis that Siberia and other areas of northern Russia were natural vents for large scale CO2 outgassing, exacerbating global warming fears.

 In effect, this compelling new data appears to show that the asphalt and concreted industrial nations are ‘mopping up’ carbon dioxide faster than their manufacturers and consumers can emit it. If this is confirmed, it means a cornerstone of man-made global warming may be in serious doubt.

Read the rest here.

Comments »

Fitch Keeps U.S. Credit Rating at ‘AAA’, Cuts Outlook to Negative

Fitch Ratings kept its pristine AAA rating on the U.S. on Monday, but the credit-ratings company downgraded its outlook to “negative” in the wake of the Supercommittee’s failure to find $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.

The development, which had been hinted at last week, could have been worse for the U.S. as McGraw-Hill’s (MHP: 41.20, +0.66, +1.63%) Standard & Poor’s slashed its credit rating for the first time ever in August.

However, the negative outlook indicates a “slightly greater” than 50% chance that Fitch downgrades the U.S. over the next two years.

“Failure to reach agreement in 2013 on a credible deficit reduction plan and a worsening of the economic and fiscal outlook would likely result in a downgrade of the U.S. sovereign rating,” David Riley, a managing director at Fitch, said in the report.

Fitch warned that its revised fiscal projections call for federal debt held by the public to exceed 90% of gross domestic product and debt interest payments making up more than 20% of total tax revenues by the end of the decade.

“In Fitch’s opinion, such a level of government indebtedness would no longer be consistent with the U.S. retaining its ‘AAA’ status despite its underlying strengths,” Riley said.

Read the rest here.

Comments »