1.6 Billion Rounds Of Ammo For Homeland Security

You call three weeks ago old?

This isn't Congress buying the ammo. it's Homeland Security so Obama approved the purchase.

I see two options:

1) Obama is about to make that exact type of ammo illegal so he wanted to get it while the getting is good,
2) It's Obama's soft payoff to the ammo manufacturers, "hey, how 'bout I'll spend a shitload of money on ammo from you. So your lobbyists leave my homies in Congress alone and you also won't make TV ads that hurt my sensitive feelings. Deal?"

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General Electric Avoids Taxes By Keeping $108 Billion Overseas

The company with the most profits parked overseas is General Electric, according to a new Bloomberg analysis of 83 corporations.

GE said in a Feb. 26 regulatory filing that it was holding $108 billion in profits overseas as of the end of last year. That is up from $102 billion a year before. GE said in the filing that it reinvested most of these profits in foreign business operations and does not intend to bring those profits back to the U.S.

The practice of holding profits overseas has been highlighted as a strategy to avoid paying taxes. GE paid no U.S. taxes at all in 2010, according to The New York Times -- an allegation GE spokesman Seth Martin called "untrue" in an email to The Huffington Post Monday.

GE did not comment on the $108 billion in profits overseas.

Sixty big U.S. companies analyzed by the Wall Street Journal kept on average more than 40 percent of their annual profits overseas last year. The companies have attributed a growing amount of their revenue to foreign sales, and they have assigned patents and licenses to foreign subsidiaries. Thanks to these practices, the U.S. is not only losing out on tax revenue, but it is also missing money kept overseas that will not be used to invest in the U.S. or pay dividends to shareholders.

It has become increasingly common for companies to move or keep their profits overseas. The biggest U.S. companies boosted their offshore cash hoards by 14 percent last year, according to a separate Bloomberg report. Apple, Microsoft and Google together have more than doubled their overseas holdings over the past two years. The drugmakers Merck and Johnson & Johnson each saved about $2 billion last year by shifting profits overseas, according to Bloomberg.

Bloomberg reported that some congressmen, including Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), want to crack down on corporate tax avoidance.

"GE did not get a tax refund in 2010, and in fact paid U.S. federal income tax and more than $1 billion in other federal, state and local taxes in the U.S. for 2010," Martin wrote in an email to HuffPost. "GE’s overall tax rate for 2010 was low because we lost $32 billion in our financial business during the global financial crisis."

But GE has come under fire for its light tax burden. Though it has been earning billions in profits, it paid an average tax rate of just 1.8 percent between 2002 and 2011, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. GE CEO Jeff Immelt has said that the U.S. tax system is "old, complex and uncompetitive" and has had a "hugely negative impact" on the economy.

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Obama Signs Sandy Bill Providing $50.5 Billion In Disaster Relief Into Law

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has signed into law a $50.5 billion emergency measure for Superstorm Sandy victims.

Congress gave the measure its final approval late Monday. Obama signed it Tuesday night, minutes after returning to the White House from a visit to Nevada.

It took Congress three months after Sandy devastated areas along the East Coast to approve the emergency funding. Obama scolded lawmakers for delaying recovery efforts even as he commended them for providing the long-awaited aid.

Conservatives concerned about billions in debt opposed the measure. Earlier this month, House Republicans removed unrelated spending from the bill.

The Oct. 29 storm was one of the worst to strike the Northeast and is blamed for more than 130 deaths and tens of billions of dollars in property damage.

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Michael Bloomberg's Contributions To Johns Hopkins University Top $1 Billion

BALTIMORE -- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged $350 million to Johns Hopkins University, mainly to expand its interdisciplinary research on an array of issues including global health and urban revitalization as his lifetime giving to his alma mater eclipses $1 billion.

The university announced the commitment late Saturday saying it believe Bloomberg, who amassed his fortune creating the global financial services firm Bloomberg LP, is now the first person to give more than $1 billion to a single American university.

The $350 million commitment is the largest ever to the Baltimore-based university, Johns Hopkins said in a statement.

Most of the latest gift, $250 million, will be part of a larger effort to raise $1 billion to foster cross-disciplinary work at Johns Hopkins, the statement said. Funds initially will be used toward appointment of faculty for interdisciplinary work on an array of issues that also will include individualized health care delivery, sustainability of water resources and the science of learning.

The remaining $100 million is to be devoted to need-based financial aid for undergraduate students, awarding 2,600 Bloomberg scholarships in the next 10 years, it said.

It added that the latest gift brings Bloomberg's giving to the institution just more than $1.11 billion in the 49 years since he graduated – including his first gift of $5 in 1965 only a year after he received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins.

"Johns Hopkins University has been an important part of my life since I first set foot on campus more than five decades ago," Bloomberg said in the statement issued by the university. "Each dollar I have given has been well-spent improving the institution and, just as importantly, making its education available to students who might otherwise not be able to afford it."

Bloomberg added that he hoped the giving would make a difference in people's lives. "I know of no other institution that can make a bigger difference in lives around the world through its groundbreaking research – especially in the field of public health," he added.

University president Ronald J. Daniels praised Bloomberg for being a "visionary philanthropist" for social good on the order of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and the school's founder, Johns Hopkins. Daniels said the chief impact of Bloomberg's gift would be to strengthen the university's multi-disciplinary approach to resolving major societal problems.

"This latest initiative allows us to greatly accelerate our investment in talented people and bring them together in a highly creative and dynamic atmosphere," Daniels added. "It illustrates Mike's passion for fixing big problems quickly and efficiently."

Money from the gift is expected to endow 50 distinguished professors to be recruited worldwide with expertise spanning traditional academic disciplines. The school said the work of those recruited would bridge disciplines and schools such as medicine, the humanities, public health and education, social science and engineering.

The New York mayor has remained closely involved with the university where he graduated in 1964, including stints on its board of trustees from 1996 to 2002 and as chairman of Johns Hopkins Initiative fundraising campaign.

The university said Bloomberg made his first $1 million commitment to the university in 1984, 20 years after his graduation. Later gifts included $120 million toward the construction of a children's section at The John Hopkins Hospital in honor of his late mother. All told, the university said, Bloomberg's philanthropy has benefited Johns Hopkins in many ways including improvements to facilities, research and the quality of its student body.

The latest gift touched off praise and excited reactions online and on the university website following the announcement.

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Online:

NYC Mayor's website: http://www.nyc.gov/mayor

John Hopkins University: http://www.jhu.edu/

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Sandy Aid Bill: Senate Approves $60.4 Billion Hurricane Recovery Package

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Friday approved a $60.4 billion aid package to pay for reconstruction costs from Superstorm Sandy, after defeating Republican efforts to trim the bill's cost.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urged the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to quickly take up the bill.

Both chambers have to agreed on a package by Jan 2, when the current term of Congress is expected to end, or restart the process of crafting legislation in 2013.

"We beat back all of the crippling amendments," said Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, which suffered the largest monetary damage in the storm.

"The century-old tradition of different parts of the country rallying to help those who are beleaguered because of difficult natural disasters continues," Schumer said.

The bill's chances in the next few days could depend on whether President Barack Obama and congressional leaders reach a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts set to begin kicking in the new year.

House Republican leaders have not yet decided whether to take up the Senate bill, a Republican aide said.

Senate Republicans complained the $60.4 billion reconstruction package requested by Obama is more than the annual budgets for the departments of Interior, Labor, Treasury and Transportation combined.

Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, offered an alternative that would have provided $23.8 billion in funding to help victims of the Oct 29 storm through the end of March and give Congress time to determine additional needs.

"Let me just say, we simply are allowing three months for the Congress of the United States, the representatives of the taxpayers' dollars, to assess, document and justify additional expenditures that go beyond emergency needs," Coats said just before his amendment was defeated.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated about $8.97 billion of the Senate bill would be spent in 2013, with another $12.66 billion spent in 2014 and $11.59 billion spent in 2015.

The Senate bill is considerably less than the $82 billion in aid requested by New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the states that bore the brunt of damage from the storm.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, was in Washington this month, lobbying lawmakers for the larger amount.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief fund now has less than $5 billion available.

The damage to New York and New Jersey coastal areas was on a scale not seen since Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans in 2005. Two weeks after that storm hit, Congress approved $62.3 billion in emergency appropriations.

Lawmakers passed numerous subsequent emergency funding requests over several years to cover damages from Katrina, which topped $100 billion.

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Did $2 Billion in Google Tax Money Disappear in Bermuda Triangle?

Google shifted $9.8 billion in revenue to Bermuda in order to avoid paying $2 billion in global taxes, Bloomberg reported. The search giant reportedly used common revenue funnelling techniques to avoid its tax obligations.

News of the tax dodging comes as governments from around the world begin decrying corporate tax avoidance.

"When corporations skip out on their taxes, the rest of us are left to pick up their tab," said tax and budget advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Dan Smith in a statement on corporate tax dodging. "Right now, this kind of tax dodging is perfectly legal, but it's not fair and it's time to put an end to it."

Google used tax avoidance techniques known as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich" to avoid its tax bills. The techniques involve sending profits through an Irish subsidiary to a Dutch firm which sends the revenue to another Irish firm headquartered in a tax haven like Bermuda.

The legal techniques are used to reduce corporate tax burden through a number of corporate loopholes found in both Ireland and the Netherlands.

Google used the tax avoidance techniques to cut its overall tax bill in half, Bloomberg reported. While tax avoidance is a common practice for corporations, Google has continued to be a prime target for tax dodging complaints.

Corporate taxation has been a big issue for politicians this year. In September, the U.S. Senate grilled HP and Microsoft on allegations of tax avoidance. Google and Amazon were also recently called out for not paying enough tax by members of the UK Parliament.

Google declined to comment on the reports.

This article was originally published on V3.

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