Word: interestion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...made Afghanistan seem like a problem largely solved. Then the extended agony of the Iraq war drew all eyes in that direction. But the problem wasn't solved, the Taliban insurgency sprang back to life, and now Afghanistan is a military and political conundrum: Is it in our national interest to double down, or is the conflict an impossible one that will only come to grief...
...world in which extreme poverty and immense wealth live side by side is simply not sustainable. We're dealing with issues--crime, nuclear weapons, diseases, swine flu--[that] no country can handle alone. How do we get governments to act cooperatively in the common interest? We saw a bit of that during the financial crisis. There was a sense of despair that pulled them together. Now that some people are rushing ahead and saying we are out of the crisis, we are falling back on the old habits of protecting our national interests...
...nation whose citizens pride themselves on self-reliance, the U.S. doles out an awful lot of welfare. Corporations get it. Farmers get it. Even poor people get it. But no other interest group makes out quite the way homeowners do. They - or we, I should say, for I'm a homeowner too - are at the receiving end of a truly staggering array of subsidies and tax breaks. Putting an exact price tag on all of them is impossible, but the value is clearly in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year...
...subsidize homeownership? Let me count the ways. First, more than 80% of the mortgage loans made in the U.S. so far this year have been bought by the government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. That keeps the interest rates on those GSE-backed mortgages substantially lower than on mortgages that can be sold only on private markets, because taxpayers are on the hook for defaults on the former. That risk, long hypothetical, became reality as we got stuck with a $291 billion rescue bill for Fannie and Freddie in the fiscal year that ended...
...included an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers - at a cost of about $14 billion for the year. That's set to expire, but there's talk in Congress of extending or even expanding it. A much bigger deal is the income tax deduction for mortgage interest paid - which has been with us as long as there's been an income tax - at a cost estimated by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation at $80 billion this year. The deduction for property taxes costs an additional $16 billion, as does the tax break on capital gains...