The Wonk Monkey wishes to apologize for the delay in posting. He has been ill and sometimes reading the news caused him to feel worse. Fortunately, the Wonk Monkey is now doing his daily pull-ups and is ready to get back to action.
The Senate has passed a new food safety bill and it is likely that the House will adopt this version of the bill in order to get it passed during the lame duck session.
The Food Safety Modernization Act would strengthen the power of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees 80 percent of the nation's food supply, vastly improving its ability to ensure safety.
The law will focus on the areas of food-borne illness prevention, detection and response. It will also protect American consumers from unsafe food made overseas by subjecting imported foods to the same standards as food produced in the United States.
The economy could take a hit if the unemployment benefits are not extended.
The Congressional Budget Office says every $1 spent on unemployment benefits generates up to $1.90 in economic growth. The program is the most effective government policy for generating growth among 11 options the CBO has analyzed.
The House is setting up a vote to extend Bush’s tax cuts for only the Middle Class. The GOP predicts that it will fail because they are using a tactic that requires 2/3 approval in order to pass.
It was Half True when John Kyle said the Washington Post argued that a failure to pass the START treaty this year would be "no calamity," and that the Associated Press said the "the administration concedes the security risk is not immediate."
We try to grant politicians some leeway in television interviews because their comments are necessarily time-constrained. And we certainly understand why Kyl would have wanted to play up the supportive evidence in the two news items and downplay what didn't fit his agenda. But we do think that the way he abridged them amounts to cherry-picking. He selectively quoted from the accounts, leaving viewers with a distinctly different impression than they would have had if they'd read the items in their entirety. So we rate his comment Half True.
It is Barely True that letting the Bush Tax cuts expire would raise taxes on small businesses.
Let’s summarize:
Would ending the Bush tax cuts raise levies on small businesses, as Cantor’s says? Sure, some extremely successful small businesses would be affected, but probably not many.
The IRS does not offer a standard definition for a small business. Cantor consistently takes IRS data on the percentage of top earners who report some business income and says it comes from small business. You can’t make that leap, as one of the reports cited by Cantor says.
What we know is that a sizable percentage of the nation’s top earners make some of their money from business profits. Their business income could come from any number of places, including stores or partnerships in law firms, medical practices or Wall Street trading houses.
About 272,000 Americans in the highest income tax bracket report more than half of their earnings come from business profits. Their average business income is $718,827, according to the Tax Policy Center, whose figures Cantor sometimes uses. That hardly sounds like a corner shop owner, whose image Cantor seems to invoke when he says Democrats are trying to raise taxes on small businesses.
We rate the claim Barely True.
It is True that the House Rules Committee is the only panel, other than the Intelligence and Ethics committees, not able to telecast proceedings in its main hearing room.
