With more than 99 percent of the votes tallied, Israel’s incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears poised to retain his office and form the next government.
Though the final campaign polls showed Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party trailing behind the centre-left Zionist Union, headed by Isaac Herzog, Likud gained 30 seats, six more than its main competitor, according to official results released on Wednesday.
The Joint Arab Coalition, an electoral alliance of four Palestinian-majority parties in Israel, pulled 14 seats, and Yesh Atid, the centrist party headed by former finance minister Yair Lapid, earned 11 seats. Kulanu, a right-wing breakaway party led by former Likud member Moshe Kahlon, took ten seats.
100,000 Layoffs and Counting: Is this the New Normal? →
The bloodletting among the oil majors and their vast web of ancillary services has of course extended to the United States – which appears to be taking far more casualties than Saudi Arabia in the battle for marketshare. In January oilfield services giant Baker Hughes said it will lay off 7,000 employees, about 11 percent of its workforce; that number was rivalled only by its competitor, Schlumberger, which let go 9,000 workers. Shell, Apache, Pemex and Halliburton are among major oil companies to issue recent pink slips to the growing army of unemployed oil workers. In the U.S., the worst pain is, not shockingly, expected to be felt in Houston. Assuming a one-third reduction in oil company capital expenditures this year and 5 percent in 2016, the hydrocarbon capital of the world could lose 75,000 jobs, in a city that has added 100,000 new positions every year since 2011, said a professor at the University of Houston.
Negotiations with Greece Close to Breakdown as Budget Strains Worsen →
That means the inertial path is that Greece does not in fact get much or any of the bailout funds it had hoped to obtain by the end of April at the latest. While the government is scrambling to find cash to make payments to the IMF and perversely, on a Goldman swap this month, it is borrowing from the pension kitty to do so. That means if tax collections do not improve, it may come up short on pension payments in upcoming months. It is not clear whether Syriza will be able to maintain public support if it fails to meet its pension obligations in full.
Virginia school suspends an 11-year-old for one year over a leaf that wasn’t marijuana →
...While the juvenile court dropped its case against the student after the tests turned up negative, the school system, in a community located midway between Roanoke and Lynchburg, has been far less forgiving. That's because stringent anti-drug policies in school districts in Virginia and elsewhere consider "imitation" drugs to be identical to real ones for disciplinary purposes.
The school's lawyer, Jim Guynn, is quoted in the Roanoke Times article defending the policy on the basis that "it's a pretty standard policy across the Commonwealth." In 2011, for instance, four seventh-graders in Chesapeake, Virginia were suspended over bringing a bag of oregano to school. A quick Google search suggests similar policies are in effect in many other states as well.
It doesn't matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf -- okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinksit might be marijuana, that's grounds for expulsion.
Are body-mounted cameras the answer for transparency in police departments? →
Not a cure-all, and many of the privacy and disclosure issues aren't resolved yet, but, in some ways, a far better situation:
The report found what seems to be a success in Rialto, Calif. Since 2012, all Rialto officers have worn body cameras. In the first year of the program, use of force by officers dropped 60 percent, and citizen complaints declined by 88 percent. (emphasis mine)
...
"Historically, there was no documentary evidence of most encounters between police officers and the public, and due to the volatile nature of those encounters, this often resulted in radically divergent accounts of incidents," Stanley wrote. "Cameras have the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false accusations of abuse."
Those are some crazy numbers.
Tax Cuts Still Don’t Pay for Themselves →
The most recent proposal to invoke this topic:
The Tax Foundation released a report last week arguing the Rubio-Lee plan would generate so much business investment that, within a decade, federal tax receipts would be higher than if taxes hadn’t been cut at all. According to William McBride, the chief economist at the right-of-center think tank, the senators’ plan would add 15 percent to gross domestic product and 13 percent to wages.
If that sounds aggressive to you, you’re not alone: I discussed the Tax Foundation report with 10 public finance economists ranging across the ideological spectrum, all of whom said its estimates of the economic effects of tax cuts were too aggressive. “This would not pass muster as an undergraduate’s model at a top university,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University professor whom the Tax Foundation specifically encouraged me to call.
And the problem (again, "dynamic scoring", or, as currently used in Congress, "tell us how you want the results to come out; we'll make it happen"):
This assumption led various economists to invoke the names of small islands.
“That’s true for the Netherlands Antilles, it’s not true for us,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office who was John McCain’s top economic adviser during his 2008 campaign.
“It’s a model that might be appropriate for Bermuda,” Mr. Kotlikoff said.
In a very small, very open economy, the Tax Foundation might be right: Cuts in investment taxes would drive a flood of foreign capital, producing a huge percentage increase in investment. But the United States is simply too big for that to work. The U.S. economy also is not perfectly open; for example, we have some restrictions on trade. Therefore, estimates of the amount of investment created by investment tax cuts should be more modest. Economists also criticized the Tax Foundation model for assuming all that new investment would fall into place very rapidly, and for failing to address economic effects from spending cuts or increased borrowing that the tax cuts would require in their first years.
Failed by Law and Courts, Troops Come Home to Repossessions →
Shameless:
Sergeant Beard had no redress in court: His lawsuit against the auto lender was thrown out because of a clause in his contract that forced any dispute into mandatory arbitration, a private system for resolving complaints where the courtroom rules of evidence do not apply. In the cloistered legal universe of mandatory arbitration, the companies sometimes pick the arbiters, and the results, which cannot be appealed, are almost never made public.
That is the experience for many Americans who are contractually obligated to resolve their disputes with investment advisers or lenders in this way. But it is supposed to be different for the troops who are deployed abroad, say military lawyers, state authorities and Pentagon officials.
Health-Care Deductibles Climbing Out of Reach →
Deductibles are an element of any insurance product, but as deductibles have grown in recent years, a surprising percentage of people with private insurance, and especially those with lower and moderate incomes, simply do not have the resources to pay their deductibles and will either have to put off care or incur medical debt.
The chart above, based on a Kaiser Family Foundation study published Wednesday, shows that about a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today’s rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage. We found that more than a third don’t have the resources to pay higher deductibles. Among low- and moderate-income households, even fewer are able to meet deductibles. It’s no wonder that collections for medical debt represent half of all bill collections. The estimates are conservative because they assume that people have all of their liquid assets available to pay their health-care bills. But most people must tap into their liquid assets to meet other obligations, such as their rent or mortgage, car repairs, or educational costs.