Senate Democrats, with backing from the White House, yesterday proposed a plan to avert the sequester by cutting $120 billion. One quarter of the savings come from eliminating direct payments under the farm bill.The package offered by Senate Democratic leaders is dead on arrival. A sequester gets all the deficit reduction from spending, but this plan gets half its savings from tax increases. Moreover, the proposed savings would not be comparable to the sequester cuts. Whereas sequestration would eliminate spending this year, the numbers in the proposed plan are multi-year numbers.
The tax numbers are somewhat suspect. A Congressional Budget Office study from July 2012 shows that the effective tax rate for those taxpayers in the top 1 per...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Developer's Note 24 August 2026: WPI recently completed an exercise that updated the codebase for this app and solved some of the discrepancies between our five-year average calculation and USDA's. There are a few lingering cases where early (late) starts (finishes) to the crop cycle resu...
