Posts tagged leader steny hoyer
Failed Federal Budget Means Middle-Class Tax Hike Likely
Jun 23rd
Congress appears unable to pass the 2011 federal budget for the first time since the 1974 Budget Act. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) essentially admitted the budget would put the nation on a path to hemorrhage trillions more than it has already bled out. Of course, there are only two ways to improve the nation’s broken budget: cutting back bloated spending and/or bumping up taxes… especially on the middle class… most likely meaning any individual earning less than $200,000 per year.
According to The Washington Post:
“Hoyer, the second-ranking House Democrat, said in an interview that he expects Congress to extend middle-class tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration that are set to expire at the end of this year. But he said the extension should not be permanent. Hoyer said he plans to call for a “serious discussion” about the affordability of the tax breaks.
“‘We’re lying to ourselves and our children if we say we can maintain our current levels of entitlement spending, defense spending and taxation without bankrupting our country,’ Hoyer says in remarks released in advance of a Tuesday speech sponsored by Third Way, a Democratic think tank.
“Hoyer’s comments come as Republicans are battering Democrats over the soaring budget deficit in advance of the fall midterm elections, accusing Obama and his colleagues in Congress of sinking the nation in red ink with spending to combat the recession.”
There’s no easy way out of America’s financial dilemma… at least today Congress acknowledges some steps toward austerity are required, and yet they still appear unlikely in the near term. As is a frequent refrain here in The Daily Reckoning, the tax increases are bound to come. There’s also a new effort underway from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to cut some of the military’s “wasteful spending.” It sounds like a step in the right direction, but instead of “waste” he should probably look at what he would likely consider only the “bare necessities,” the US’ worldwide and ever-expanding war operations.
You can read more of the details in The Washington Post’s coverage of how middle-class tax breaks are not affordable in the long run.
Best,
Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning
Failed Federal Budget Means Middle-Class Tax Hike Likely originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, offers a uniquely refreshing, perspective on the global economy, investing, gold, stocks and today’s markets. Its been called “the most entertaining read of the day.”
Hoyer: Dems might not pass a budget
Apr 13th
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is unsure whether Congress will pass a budget this year, acknowledging that it’s difficult to pass large, complex spending resolutions in the House during election years.
The Maryland Democrat said he and Budget committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) “both believe that it would be important” to pass a budget but they’re unsure if Democrats have the votes to pass it through the lower body.
Republicans did not pass a budget resolution in 1998, 2002 2004 and 2006 – all years when members of Congress faced re-elections.
“Obviously, as I just pointed out to you, it’s difficult to pass budgets in election years,” Hoyer said.
‘Act of Congress’ to sell house
Mar 31st
Lenders often say they don’t want to repossess houses. So you might expect that a borrower selling to avoid foreclosure — and not via short sale — would delight them.
But Bonnie Jordan, exactly that sort of borrower, says her lender endangered the sale of her Edgewater house by not promptly providing a key number: how much she owed.
"I’ve never seen anything quite like it before," said Diane Olsen, Jordan’s real estate agent. "They just gave her the worst runaround."
Jordan said her title company contacted Chase for the payoff information Feb. 24 and several times afterward with no luck. Then Jordan tried, calling the company March 1 and many times afterward. Most of the time, she said, she left messages for people who didn’t call back.
Once she was told that Chase didn’t know the total because her case had been forwarded to a law firm, and so the number would include attorneys’ fees. She said she called the law firm and was told first that it didn’t have her information, and later that it didn’t have any idea how long she might have to wait to get it.
Meanwhile, Jordan’s March 12 closing date was closing in.
Then the buyer’s lender — for reasons unconnected to Jordan’s situation — decided not to extend a mortgage for the deal. That pushed off the settlement date by five days as the buyer rushed to get replacement financing. But Jordan still didn’t have the payoff information.
On March 11, the day before she was originally supposed to close, she called House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office to plead for help.
Just before 1 p.m. March 12 — several hours after her original closing time — she got a call from a Hoyer aide who said the information was on its way. (Hoyer’s office confirmed to me that it had worked on her case.)
Both Jordan and her agent said they think Chase wanted to foreclose on her because she had equity. She’d made a 50 percent down payment when she bought the home.
"Why wouldn’t they for a change want to own a property that had $100 to $150,000 in equity?" said Olsen, with ReMax Advantage Realty in Severna Park.
I asked Tom Kelly, a spokesman for Chase home lending, why it took 16 days for the company to provide information that — according to Olsen — normally takes a day or two. He said it’s more complicated for a homeowner in the foreclosure process.
"We had to determine if the borrower had incurred additional fees," he said.
He said the clock didn’t start until she requested it March 1. Although she signed an authorization form for the title company, only the borrower can request that information if she’s in foreclosure, he said. "We provided the … payoff statement in fewer than 10 business days from when we received an authorized request," Kelly said.
Did it take the intervention of the House majority leader’s office? "The payoff letter was already in process," he said.
Jordan doubts it. A representative at Chase’s law firm "said they were all backed up, ‘We don’t know when we’ll have it,’" she said. (The firm wasn’t too backed up to file paperwork to start foreclosure proceedings on her loan, though — it did that March 8, which added more fees to her grand total.)
Jordan also says no one told her title company that it wasn’t authorized to get the payoff information.
Olsen, her agent, said she was glad Hoyer’s office could help but thinks it’s a shame that it came to that. If all struggling borrowers turn to their Congressmen, “the entire system will come to a grinding halt," she said.
Jordan bought the house when she left Florida for Maryland in 2007, but it was not an auspicious move — and not just because she paid $575,000 but ultimately sold for $450,000.
Her husband couldn’t find a job here. Neither could Jordan, an attorney specializing in elder law. They tried to sell last summer, but a buyer backed out of the contract after they had already packed up and moved back to Florida. After that, she said, she couldn’t afford the mortgage.
"It’s been a nightmare," she said.
Her financial woes aren’t over, either. But at least she avoided foreclosure.
In an email to relatives headlined "WE SOLD THE HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!," she wrote: "It literally took an Act of Congress."
Health Care Bill to be Online for 72 Hours Before Final House Vote — Pelosi Is the Transparency Leader?
Jan 15th
By Jim Harper
The Sunlight Foundation cites this tweet, and newspapers confirm, that the House leadership has promised to put the final health care bill online for 72 hours before a final vote.
“The move came after Rep. Scott Murphy, D-N.Y., urged colleagues to join him in asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., for a three-day time-out before any floor vote,” reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Kudos to Representative Murphy for bringing this up. Congratulations to the Sunlight Foundation for organizing the closely related Read the Bill campaign, which is pressuring Congress to post bills online for 72 hours before debate begins.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s unfulfilled transparency promises are beginning to draw derision not only from political partisans but from the mainstream media. For example, the L.A. Times “Top of the Ticket” blog mocked the administration yesterday in a post called, “Joe Biden Update: He Meets on Transparency Today. But the Meeting is Closed.”
[T]oday’s Biden schedule highlight is a meeting with the chief of transparency for economic recovery. But, unfortunately, the transparency meeting is non-transparent, closed to the press… Which makes it — what? — secret openness? Open secrecy?
That post cites this one at a site called Media-ite, where columnist Tommy Christopher bemoans the president’s failure to see through his promise to put health care negotiations on C-SPAN.
Secret negotiations like the one between the pharmaceutical lobby, the White House, and the Senate Finance Committee are the Obama pledge’s raison d’etre. Hours of debate and information are nice, but the real value of transparency is in keeping everyone honest. By meeting with insurance and pharmaceutical industry leaders in private, the administration has shielded the parties most in need of being kept honest, the ones most likely to poison the process.
If you had asked people a year ago whether President Obama or Speaker Pelosi would be the leader in legislative transparency, I don’t think many would have bet on the latter. This is not to say that the process has been transparent enough — the production of the health care bill has been quite opaque compared to what’s possible and desirable. But Pelosi is the current leader on transparency, if only by substantial default.
