Money & Taxes

tennessee/shutterstock

Political action committees and concerned citizens of all stripes have come out against two bills in the Tennessee state legislature that would effectively increase taxes paid by utility companies and broadband providers for use of the poles in that state. Both anti-tax groups and broadband access groups are concerned that the bill could limit investment in broadband throughout the state.[read more]

image via shutterstock

Maryland State Senator Catherine E. Pugh has introduced four bills in this legislative session, and Governor Martin O’Malley has announced a package of initiatives designed to further Maryland’s leadership as a hub for cybersecurity jobs.[read more]

financials/shutterstock

Idaho has launched a new government transparency website which includes downloadable financial reports from public offices over the last several years. The reports range from broad summaries of State revenues and expenditures with easy-to-read charts and graphs, to detailed snapshots of agency-level finances.[read more]

va/shutterstock

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has put forward a new transportation goal for 2013, and that goal includes a challenge to legislators – find $500 million in new revenues to pay for it. At the Governor’s annual transportation conference, he laid out is plans for the state’s transportation system.[read more]

newjersey/shutterstock

Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) has passed a bill through the Senate that would allow the state to get on the shared services bandwagon or face the loss of state aid. New Jersey has been working for the last year to move its many small municipalities on to a shared services model in an effort to control costs, but some cities and townships have been reluctant to move to the model. Now, state officials want to add some teeth to the plan.[read more]

Shutterstock

Following up on a housing and transportation cost report released earlier this year, and reported on by CivSource, the Center for Housing Policy—the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference—and the Center for Neighborhood Technology has released a new report – Losing Ground: The Struggle of Moderate-Income Households to...[read more]

"Featuring all your favourite tax dodgers. You too can avoid your fair share like a celebrity!"[read more]

If you want to “live within your means,” you must first establish what those “means” are. Start with an inventory.[read more]

Budget/Shutterstock

State budgets are much improved since the end of the Great Recession, but they still face considerable challenges. Ten states are reporting that they will end FY 2012 with year-end balances of ten percent or more, an improvement over the years coming out of the 2008 financial crisis where many states were lucky to report that figure at 1% or above.[read more]

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law a homeowners bill of rights. The new law provides additional options for homeowners that are facing foreclosure and are being unduly hassled by bill and loan collectors. The law comes as new data shows that California leads the nation in foreclosures, with the highest rate since 2005....[read more]

Image by debaird™ via Flickr

Congratulations to Joe Anderson, Liverpool's new Mayor. Having a directly elected civic leader - almost regardless of which party holds the post - will be good news for the city. But there's no getting away from it. Yesterday, voters in Manchester, Coventry, Nottingham and Bradford rejected the idea of directly elected mayors. Birmingham...[read more]

Photo courtesy of author

Fancy coffee shop. This one happens to be Caribou, but it could be Starbucks or any other. For some it is a hideout because they have nowhere else to go. For others it's a quick stop, drop $5, on the way to well-paying job. Society is way too divided right now between rich and poor...some are wealthy beyond wealth and many are hopeless...[read more]

Saving the Euro, suggest ministers, will restore economic growth to Britain. It is, they imply, the most important thing we must do to ensure our own recovery. Perhaps if the single currency was such a panacea for growth, we'd have seen a little more of it in stagnant Euroland this past ten years? Maintaining the Euro at any price won't...[read more]

I’ve been thinking a lot about these two types of graphs at the moment.  This first is a single chart that shows income growth for various segments of the US population broken down by wealth. This second is a group of graphs that talk about pageviews and visits to various websites on the internet. What is fascinating about the...[read more]

Louisiana has lost an $80 million rural broadband grant for failing to keep their broadband expansion project on track. The Commerce Department rescinded the grant stating that the project administrators were repeatedly unresponsive to requests for information and updates on where the project stood. Senator Mary Landrieu has said that...[read more]