Kelo Update: Guess What New Developer Wants Before Going Forward?

By Tom Blumer | April 23, 2011 | 19:00

In its infamous June 2005 Kelo vs. New London ruling, a Supreme Court majority allowed the city of New London to seize the properties of holdout homeowners in that city's Fort Trumbull area for the "public purpose" of economic development, not a "public use" as the Constitution's Fifth Amendment requires.

It has been eleven years since the litigation began, six years since the court's ruling, and almost five years since the final settlement between the City and final holdouts the Cristofaro family and Susette Kelo, whose former home now stands elsewhere as a de facto monument to the perils of overbearing government. The land involved is still vacant, and nothing of substance has since happened. In late 2009, Pfizer, the economic linchpin which supposedly drove the city's need to remake the area, announced that it was pulling out of New London.

After several false starts, the city is working with a new developer. As of February of last year, this developer wanted to put rental townhouses in an area where century-old, largely owner-occupied homes once stood.

Early Friday, the New London Day's Kathleen Edgecomb reported a new twist. Wait until you see what the developer wants before going forward.

Yep, tax abatements:

Would-be Fort Trumbull developers seek tax break

A developer hoping to build housing at Fort Trumbull said Thursday they will seek tax abatements from the city to move the project forward.

Robert and Irwin Stillman, the father and son owners of Westport-based River Bank Construction, said the abatements were necessary to make the project financially feasible.

"If abatements are not approved, we would have to reconsider,'' Robert Stillman said during a meeting Thursday afternoon with The Day's editorial board.

The city has granted tax abatements to two other residential developments over the past few years, including Harbour Towers and Shaw's Landing, both on Bank Street.

Michael Joplin, president of the New London Development Corp., said the city should offer the abatements because it will help increase homeownership and eventually bring in more taxes.

The NLDC does not look at short-term economic rewards, he said. Rather, it seeks to increase the tax base and create economic development that will be (sic) span the next 30 to 40 years.

The Stillmans said they expect the two-bedroom units, which make up 70 percent of the construction, to sell between $300,000 and $375,000. They will first be available as rental units and then sold as condominiums when the real-estate market improves.

"Our intent is to sell the units,'' Irwin Stillman said. "We do not own a single rental unit. Our history is, we are not renters.''

The 90-acre Fort Trumbull development area has been an ongoing issue in the city for more than 10 years. The NLDC presented a plan in 2000 that the city approved that in essence leveled nearly all the buildings in Fort Trumbull to make way for new construction. Several property owners fought the eminent domain taking of their land all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where eventually justices ruled in favor of the city.

Edgecomb continued what is now a disgraceful five-year tradition at The Day of not mentioning "Kelo" any time it writes a story concerning the Fort Trumbull area.

The establishment press is in the sixth year of its own tradition: Not following up on what has really happened in the area involved in the most important and disastrous property-rights ruling in several decades. Perhaps they'd prefer that the country not be aware of the post-Kelo reality, because it might cause average people who aren't necessarily politically active to question the "wisdom" of the elites who think they can do a better job with the nation's land and other resources than private property owners.

In its opinion (scroll to Section IV), the Justices opined in 2005 that "The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including–but by no means limited to–new jobs and increased tax revenue." In 2011, a city which could have collected five more years of property taxes from established homeowners by now is instead contemplating and appears likely to approve tax breaks to a developer of rental units it hopes to convert to condos when the real estate market gets better. 

This outcome makes a complete mockery of the Supreme Court majority's belief that a "carefully formulated ... economic development plan" was ever in place. The press's five-year lack of coverage makes a mockery of its claim to be interested in meaningful story follow-up.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Read more: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2011/04/23/kelo-update-guess-what-new-developer-wants-go-forward#ixzz1KUlpFOQ1

Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues

By Elizabeth MacDonald

Published April 20, 2011

380

| FOXBusiness

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.

Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.

But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times.

Also, an estimated 59% of the 308.7 million Americans in this country get at least one federal benefit, according to the Census Bureau, based on 2009 data. An estimated 46.5 million get Social Security; 42.6 million get Medicare; 42.4 million get Medicaid; 36.1 million get food stamps; 12.4 million get housing subsidies; and 3.2 million get Veterans' benefits. 

And the handouts from the government have been growing. Government cash handouts account for a whopping 79% of household growth since 2007, even as household tax payments--for things like the income and payroll tax, among other taxes--have fallen by $312 billion.

That is a tough feeding trough to take away from voters.

One of the recurring themes FOX Business has been covering is “how the world has been turned upside down – well, the business world at least,” notes FOX Director of Business News, Ray Hennessey. “In a free market, profit is generated by hard work and enterprise," Hennessey notes, adding: “Because of the labor of the worker, companies generally have the ability to prosper and make more money, both for their employees and their owners," which in turn creates tax revenues.

Seems like common sense, right? That’s because it is. But not in our country today. Somehow the DNA of our country is changing. Wealth creation is coming from DC, not from America’s entrepreneurs.

In short, Americans have the government, not private enterprise, to thank for their wealth growth.

Obviously, there are big implications to this. 

For instance, Hennessey asks, if indeed more households have the government to thank for their wealth, does that mean those households are more inclined to re-elect politicians who are pushing for more government handouts? 

Does the workforce erode because it is easier to collect a check than answer to an alarm clock each morning?

Is our competitiveness as a nation hurt because profit is generated not by American capitalism but by European-style socialism? Can we, as taxpayers, afford to carry the burden of government-sponsored wealth creation?

All this comes at a time when a growing number of Wall Street houses, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM: 44.56, -0.09, -0.20%) and Barclays Capital (BCS: 19.38, +0.25, +1.31%), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) are cutting their U.S. GDP growth forecasts by as much as a percentage point or more.

It also comes as President Barack Obama is already in re-election mode, as he bets his massive spending will woo independents. It also comes as Standard & Poor’s has joined the International Monetary Fund and Pimco, which runs the world’s biggest bond fund, in downgrading their outlook on US debt.

The negative outlook comes as the government has added the equivalent of Germany and Russia combined in spending from the time Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi gaveled in as House Speaker in January 2007. The government, like never before, has put the thumb on the scale as it picks winners and losers.

Yes, the dollar rallied and Treasuries bounced higher after the news that S&P had issued a negative outlook on the U.S. debt picture. Some argued that happened because eventual austerity would slow growth, which is deflationary and in turn good for bonds. 

But that ignores the flight away from rocky overseas markets toward the Treasury's safe haven status, which drives yields down. Potential sovereign debt defaults are a huge problem in the Eurozone, particularly in Greece, where yields rocketed above 13% earlier this week.

The bullish view about U.S. bond prices also ignores the fact that the Federal Reserve has been buying Treasury bonds and notes, $600 billion so far this year, more than half of the Treasury Dept.'s issuance. That keeps a lid on bond yields. When bond prices rise, the government doesn't have to lure investors with higher yields. When bond prices fall, the government offers higher yields to reel investors in.

The bullish view about U.S. bond prices also ignores the negative trend in the dollar, which has been weakening. 

And it ignores the bond market’s brutal reaction to spending under President Bill Clinton, where yields spiked several percentage points higher beginning in 1994, rising from around 5% before topping out above 8%, before then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin forced austerity, leading to welfare reform. 

Republicans now want to shrink the U.S. government, but Democrats want to stymie their efforts. This, after the President touted $38 billion in spending cuts as the largest in our nation’s history, just four months or so after touting the massive spending increase pushed through in the lame duck Congressional session.

And after the White House shelved the Bowles-Simpson debt commission report, a panel which the President asked for, endorsed and then ignored, hoping such hard decisions might be delayed until after the election.

President Obama had asked for the debt commission to "address the long-term quandary of a government that continually and extravagantly spends more than it takes in," only to initially set aside  the commission's recommendations.

And earlier this year the White House first introduced a budget that would have added $6.7 trillion more in deficit spending over the next 10 years, yanking the national debt higher to more than 75% of gross domestic product, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That, until GOP Rep. Paul Ryan offered his $4.4 trillion in spending cuts over ten years, causing the President to offer $4 trillion in cuts over 12 years.

The Fiscal Times reports that “the only other time government income support exceeded taxes paid was from 1931 to 1936.” The Times notes that “government transfers of income to households started to overtake personal taxes at the start of 2008, and the gap has been widening.”

The difference between what households received and what they paid in taxes is about $125 billion, equal to a little more than “three times the amount Republicans and Democrats agreed to cut from government spending through Sept. 30,” the Fiscal Times said. Typically, the gap between government transfers and taxes runs the other way, the Times reports.

“In normal times the household sector gives about eight percentage points more of its income in taxes than it receives in direct transfers,” the Times quotes J.P. Morgan economist Michael Feroli as saying, adding that a return to normalcy, or this eight-percentage-point spread, is equal to about $1.2 trillion in income.

So the question is: What government policies will bring the U.S. labor market back to robust health, enough to drive economic growth, consumer spending -- and higher tax revenues?

When will the U.S. government pull back from its intervention into the U.S. economy, so the economy can try to stand on its own?

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/04/20/government-cash-handouts-exceed-tax-revenues/#ixzz1KA3CJ35C

The Confederate constitution.  If secession was about states rights, you'd expect a different enumeration of federal v states rights in the Confederate constitution compared to the US one, with new limitations on federal government power. Except--that doesn't happen. The only new limit on federal power, the only new right states explicitly have, is slavery.

Look at the secession resolutions. They were all about slavery.

The south went to war for slavery, and the north went to war because South Carolina fired on a US fort. 

Pakistan

Waziristan has been the issue since Bora Bora.  We are not serious, and they know it.