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Felipe Caldron, Mexico's new President, addressed one of Mexico's biggest problems low tax revenue by getting passed through the legislature a tax bill that will increase tax revenues from 11% of gross domestic product to 13.5 % of GDP. This will be done by a corporate tax that taxes sales rather than profits starting at 16.5% in 2008 and rising to 17.5% in 2010. The original proposal Calderon requested would have taken this to 19%. The bill cuts taxes on Pemex which will give it an additional $3 billion a year as it is falling behind in new reserves added from exploration and drilling that would replace ones being depleted leading to a decline in output. And the tax bill imposes a tax of 2.5% on cash deposits above $2200 to attempt to collect some taxes from the underground economy which employs about a quarter of the workforce. In addition it imposes a gasoline tax of 5.5% that will go to the state governors for local spending needs. The deal was negotiated by giving the opposition reforms in the electoral process including replacing all commissioners of the Federal Election Institute, and bans radio and television advertising for candidates. Calderon wanted to increase the taxe revenue to 14% of GDP, this would increase it to 13.5%. Considering the previous administrations failure to get any legislation through Congress while Pemex production slipped, and tax revenues were some of the lowest in the world due to widespread evasion (see a similiar problem and tax reforms in the Philippines recently), this is a breakthrough. But Pemex has to turn the corner, and lags way behind Petrobras in Brazil in terms of progress in exploration and new reserves. Revenues from the oil company largely help fund state spending in Mexico. However reforms that free up the state energy sector as Brazil has done (see the recent article on Petrobras in wsj ) some years back are still for the future. How much will this help. Its a modest beginning from a low point under the Vicent Fox administration. The additional $10 billion it generates next year will go to fill the gap in declining tax revenues from state oil company Pemex, and rising health and pension committments of the state....

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Indifference on the Republican side, and a sense that not much is going to get done on the Democratic side, as President Obama pitches a $447 billion second stimulus plan in a speech to both houses of the U.S. Congress on September 8, 2011. Dana Milbank documents the attitudes and skepticism with which members of Congress received the proposals- a general sense that President Obama was too weak and ineffective to get things done and has lost credibility. John Taylor, senior economic advisor on the Republican side pointed out in a Wall Street Journal column a few days before the speech, that the jobs proposals Obama and economic advisor Alan Krueger were presenting were similiar to old plans that have not produced results. Taylor viewed them as placing too much reliance on government and not enough on the private sector to generate economic growth and jobs.

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In one of its first major votes the newly elected U.S. House of Representatives approved the Keystone XL pipeline by a vote of 252 to 161.

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Gen. Keane and Pletka say action by the U.S. is needed in 2013 to render ineffective the airdefense system and runways used by warplanes of the Assad regime. They emphasize that the U.S. has the technology and capacity to do this even with the Russian systems added in Syria. The lack of a U.S. response in the face of the Assad regime's attacks on civilian populations and use of chemical weapons, the support to the U.S. from the Arab world and Turkey, and the huge refugee problems in Jordan and Turkey, say Keane and Pletka, will lead to creating a worse situation than the relatively small risks of destroying the runways for Assad's warplanes and the airdefense system.

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The faltering approach on Syria of the Obama administration and the events that lead to the decision on June 13, 2013, to provide arms to the opposition forces.

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Bill Keller of the NYT points out that getting Syria right means getting over the obsession over what went wrong in Iraq and looking objectively at the situation in Syria. He points to the failure of president Obama in grasping what the Assad regime has done to Syria, the refugees in Jordan, the use of artillery and air raids on civilian population, and inviting the support by fundmentalist Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia in the absence of U.S. and European support, making delay after delay by president Obama leading to a paralysis in response. Leaving the question for the future which was a worse U.S. response- the hasty action in Iraq or the paralysis in Syria?

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Pearlstein quotes Dickens in "Oliver Twist," about the law being an ass, and the constitutional law exercize in the Supreme Court of the U.S. giving a sense of a failure of the so-called best and brightest in reasoning out the issues. He points out that a serious problem is that American business which is burdened with high health care costs for employees is seriously missing in this debate after years of complaining about high costs. The National Federation of Independent Businesses is actually one of the plaintiffs questioning the constitutionality of the Obama health care law. Pearlstein says business wanted an end to the fee-for-service medicine that increases consumption of medical services and pushes up cost relentlessly, and that Obama's health care law does this. This is not the case as both Democrats and Republican administrations have failed to resolve this side of the cost issue, and this is the hidden reason for the loss of credibility for both sides in this debate, leaving health care problems to be resolved in future administrations. ...

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According to Census Bureau data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, 6.1 million Hispanic children lived in poverty in 2010. The poverty line is defined as a family of four living on $22,314. Of the total poor children in 2010, 37.3% were Hispanic, 30.5% white, and 26.6% black. Hispanics were hit hard by the 2008-2009 recession because many are employed in construction and the hospitality industries or blue collar jobs. A majority of the Hispanic children were born in the U.S. 4.1 million have immigrant parents and 2.0 million have U.S. born parents. Of the total U.S. population Latinos are 16%, yet they comprise 23% of all the children in the country. With a quarter of America's children being Latino -and with these numbers expected to grow in coming years because of higher birth rates- the fact that many of these children are less likely to get a college education or acquire technical skills because of poverty levels, has serious implications for America's future competitiveness.

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Prof. Cherlin of John Hopkins University's sociology department tells us why it is important to revive the term "working class" in America after it has fallen into disuse. He points out that lumping the "working class" with the middle class, as most political leaders including Obama have done, is a serious mistake. As disparities have increased between college educated Americans and non-college educated Americans with only a diploma or less ( who comprise 54% of the adult population with children under age 18), and as the lifestyles, living standards, and educational opportunities of children have diverged for these two groups, this no longer makes sense. One reason for the disuse was that the term was seen as derogatory at some point in time because of media stereotypes of working class people. Yet only by reviivng the term and facing up to the problems faced by this group can America really address its problems as a society, or as a people. Even economic recovery could be elusive without increasing the consumer spending, and by this the incomes and future prospects of the working class. Underneath this is something more important, which has shaped the lives of people throughout the world in the 20th century and into the 21st- the sense of hope and opportunity, of upward economic and social mobility, especially for children of all classes. ...

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This article by General James Jones is the second from the highest ranks of the Obama administration, saying the entire Middle East policy of U.S. president Obama was flawed and could lead to dangerous consequences. Gen. Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama 2009-2010, says the situation today is worse than in 1991 when the U.S. launched Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurdish refugees in Northern Iraq from Saddam Hussein, with an engagement of about 5 years and 25,000 Allied troops. Jones says the crisis in Iraq and Syria is of an order several times worse than 1991 and at any time since the 2003 invasion, as it involves the setup of a terrorist ISIS state in the heart of the Middle East. What went wrong? Jones says all the warnings from other Middle East nations about Maliki's corrupt policy and sectarianism used to stay in power turned to be true. Even Maliki's own advisors and colleagues say in a separate report by Matt Bradley that Maliki battled not for the Iraqi state but only to preserve his own power. Jones calls the U.S. president's decision not to act in Syria when the "red line" of use of chemical weapons was crossed, the failure to maintain a limited military training presence in Iraq after 2011, and not insisting that Mr. Maliki arm the Kurds, as having gravely aggravated the problem in 2014. Jones calls for arming the Kurds directly with sufficient weaponry for defending their region and providing immediate expanded aid to the Abadi government, appointment of a special envoy to ensure direct and immediate communications with Baghdad and with Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite leaders. He calls also for close air support of Iraqi and Kurdish operations, and an aggressive diplomatic effort to unify the Middle Eastern nations to remove ISIS from the region. Jones says this is the right thing to do in the name of all the Iraqi people yearning for peace, for the U.S. service personnel who made sacrifices in Iraq for 23 years, and for U.S. national security....