Battle over U.S. millionaire taxes looming
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- The White House says President Obama will propose taxing upper-income Americans at the same rate as the middle class in a speech this week.
Obama will unveil his proposal Monday as a means of advancing the ball in the budget battle at the same time the U.S. presidential campaign is gaining momentum.
Unnamed administration officials told The New York Times Obama will propose having taxpayers who make more than $1 million a year pay the same percentage on their earnings as the middle class. In return, Democrats would get behind future cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
The newspaper Sunday said Obama's plan would rally around recent public comments by investment mogul Warren Buffet, who said the wealthy had been "coddled" by Congress and been able to take advantage of tax rates on investments that are lower than income-tax rates the middle class is more likely to pay.
There are indications already that the Republicans will oppose the plan because of their entrenched opposition to any kind of tax increase. House Speaker John Boehner said last week that while the GOP was open to discussions on tax reform when a bipartisan commission on budget reduction gets to work later this fall, "Tax increases, however, are not a viable option for the joint committee."
A prominent Republican economist took issue with Buffet's opinion. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard said most millionaires actually live off their income, which is taxed at 35 percent, rather than investments.
Other analysts doubted raising taxes on the rich would have much of an impact. "The big money is in the middle-class subsidies," Leonard Burman, former director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told the Washington Post. "You're not going to balance the budget by eliminating ethanol credits. You have to go after things that really matter to a lot of people."
New Florida-Cuba flight corridor opens
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Sept. 18 (UPI) -- U.S. Cold War policies have thawed further as more flights from Florida to Cuba began this weekend in Fort Lauderdale.
The Airline Brokers Co. charter airline staged a Cuban-themed party event at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport Saturday. Meanwhile, 110 passengers embarked on the short flight to Havana, The Miami Herald reported.
The company is leasing aircraft from JetBlue for its once-weekly return flights, the report said.
Since President Barack Obama loosened travel restrictions to the Caribbean island that was a lynchpin in the Soviet-U.S. Cold War that began in the late 1940s, travel there has begun from Miami, Tampa, New York, Los Angeles and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Cuba is just 90 miles from southern Florida and in 1962, President John Kennedy ordered a naval embargo based on intelligence that the Soviets were building ballistic nuclear missile launch sites on the island. Tensions cooled, although the United States still maintains a significant military presence at a 45-square mile Cuban base in Guantanamo in the southeast.
U.S. drone goes down in Pakistan
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- A U.S. unmanned aircraft crashed in northwestern Pakistan Sunday, sparking a flurry of rumors, Geo News reported from Peshawar.
The drone, remote-controlled aircraft went down near Sangar in the province of South Waziristan, although U.S. officials didn't issue a statement about it.
Geo said there were conflicting reports from local military and police officials about the crash. Some said a technical failure caused the aircraft to fall from the sky, while Taliban extremists claimed they had shot it down.
Pakistani soldiers were dispatched to secure the crash site, the report said.
The use of drone aircraft, widely reported to be CIA operations as a surveillance tool and sometimes attack system, is a contentious point between Pakistan and the United States.
Pakistan alleges the unilateral use of drones along the border with Afghanistan to detect and attack al-Qaida and Taliban militants is an infringement on its sovereignty.
Dengue fever deaths hit 32 in Pakistan
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- Pakistani officials have raised the death toll in the current outbreak of dengue fever to 32.
The nation's health agency said Sunday three more patients died in Lahore and another in the city of Sindh.
The official number of cases was set at 6,147 with thee vast majority in Lahore.
However, officials believe there are a number of unreported deaths from the outbreak.
Chief Minister of Punjab Mian Shahbaz said the situation was becoming more dire because dengue outbreaks can be very stubborn and difficult to eradicate, DawnNews said.
"Every individual belonging to any profession, including politicians, will have to work to combat this disease," said Shahbaz.
