Alabama Proudly Kicks Thousands of Children Out of School, Rick Santorum’s Plan is Zero, Zero, Zero (Just like Him)

And Other News With Long and Short Comments

Herman Cain has risen into contention (well not really, it just looks that way) in the Republican Presidential race, and part of his program is a 9-9-9 plan.  This would make the income tax 9%, the corporation tax 9% and a national sales tax 9%. Rick Santorum (who?) has him one better,

“One of the great problems in our economy,” Santorum said, is “the middle of America has started to disappear.”

To reverse that, Santorum said, he’d reduce corporate income taxes on manufacturers to zero, eliminate taxes on funds invested overseas that are brought back to the United States, and “zero out and repeal every regulation the Obama administration has put in place.”

Thus relieving middle America of the huge burden of the corporate income tax.  The good news, nobody takes Mr. Santorum seriously, in fact they never did.

After a Federal judge upheld provisions of a law in Alabama requiring public schools to check the immigration status of students,

Statewide, 1,988 Hispanic students were absent on Friday, about 5 percent of the entire Hispanic population of the school system.

Presumably this is just the start, and the folks in Alabama must be awfully proud of driving thousands of public school kids out of their school system. That will teach those six year olds to come into the country illegally just because their parents brought them here.  

Kinda reminds Alabamans of the good old days when they denied equal public education to . . ., well you know who.

In most of the country it is now fall.  In Alabama it is the Mean Season.

Remember how Britain’s Conservative coalition government has been boasting about how well their economic policy is doing and how they don’t need to change anything?  Moody’s has downgraded ratings on some of their big (and small) banks.

Lloyds Banking Group, Santander UK, Royal Bank of Scotland, Co-operative Bank, Nationwide and seven smaller building societies had their debt downgraded by Moody's Investor Service.

The government’s response was this.

Chancellor George Osborne said the move reflected the British Government's shift away from guaranteeing all the UK's largest banks.

He added: "I'm confident that British banks are well capitalised, they are liquid, they are not experiencing the kinds of problems that some of the banks in the eurozone are experiencing at the moment."

They would say that, wouldn’t they.  “Nothing to see here, move along”.

The U.S. Banking System may be exposed to European crisis.  The amount could be $641 billion according to a report given to the Congress.  The reason for the “could” statement is this.

The research service papers note their figure is only a rough guess. It includes two types of assets, direct holdings such as loans, and “other potential exposures” such as derivative contracts, guarantees and credit commitments. Analysts say the estimate could be much higher or lower because it’s hard to quantify exactly “other potential exposures.” For example, a bank could hold two different derivative contracts that effectively cancel each other out.

Now the first rule in undertaking any risk related action is to know, understand and be able to quantify the degree of risk and the amount exposed to risk.  The fact that no one knows how much exposure the U. S. has to Europe and European banks is just another indication, if one was needed, on the inability of banking institutions in the U.S. to manage their business.

Of course, there is this re-assurance.

Senator Mark Kirk, (R., Ill.) asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing Thursday if the U.S. is about to experience another “Lehman Brothers situation” because of euro-zone contagion.

Geithner said “absolutely not.”

“The direct exposure of the U.S. financial system to the countries under the most pressure in Europe is very modest…very limited,” the Treasury Secretary told the committee. Besides, Geithner added, U.S. banks have much stronger capital positions than in 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

but given the fact that Mr. Geithner was present at and part of the creation of the on-going economic crisis in the U. S., has failed to be part of the solution as Secretary of Treasury, denied there was any problem with the debt ceiling  and could not even get his own income tax return correct, , the fact that he is not worried is all the more reason for everyone else to be worried.

And we are.