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Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Hillary Clinton Has A Plan To Help Coal Workers. Donald Trump Has A Scapegoat.

Hillary Clinton has a $30 billion, 4,300-word plan to retrain coal workers that covers everything from education and infrastructure to tax credits and school funding.

Donald Trump’s coal plan is a duckface thumbs-up in a miner’s hard hat and a rant about hair spray, President Barack Obama and China. The specifics of his plan to put coal miners back to work, David Gutman reported in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, are that he’d put coal miners back to work. That’s it.

And Trump is the candidate who won the West Virginia Coal Association’s endorsement ahead of Tuesday's West Virginia presidential primary.

“Trump is a successful businessman. He is committed to success," the trade association's senior vice president, Chris Hamilton, told The Huffington Post.

“Hillary’s plan is akin to somebody running you over, then offering to pick you up,” he said. “It’s not a plan. It’s a care package.”

What Trump’s anger has that Clinton’s policy lacks is a villain. In Trump’s telling, the coal industry is hurting because of excessive safety and environmental regulations imposed by Obama's Environmental Protection Agency. It’s a simple story that Trump can promise out-of-work coal miners he will reverse.

“Because Obama and the EPA are a focal point, they now have an easy explanation for why they’re in trouble, why they have lost their jobs,” Robert Rupp, political science professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College, told the Financial Times. “And surprise, surprise, what is Trump promising? He’s promising that it’s all Obama’s fault and they’re going to open up the mines.”

Fact-checking Trump is a fool’s errand, but as viscerally satisfying as it is to say Obama killed coal, it isn’t true. The coal industry is killing itself, with debt it loaded up to fund deals that would only be profitable if Chinese demand for steel-making coal continued to surge. That was just before demand tanked. At the same time, coal has been battered by competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy, HuffPost's Kate Sheppard reported.

In other words, the coal industry is imploding. Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, and Patriot Coal have filed for bankruptcy in recent months -- hurt by cleaner competition but also because of the industry's own mistakes. And the decline in coal jobs has been a decades-long trend. In 1985, the industry employed 177,000 people. By the end of 2008, that number had been whittled to just 86,000. Now it's just 56,000.

Clinton’s plan starts by putting the coal industry in the context of cheaper renewable energy and natural gas, climate change, and the negative health effects of mining and burning coal. Her rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), focuses on the shrinking number of well-paying jobs in coal country, and wants to spend $41 billion on things like worker benefits, clean energy and infrastructure. Both Clinton and Sanders clearly see the benefits of an economy that uses far less coal and employs far fewer people to mine it.

And both Democratic candidates' policies acknowledge that coal workers and communities shouldn’t be punished anymore than they have because they work in a dirty, dangerous industry.

That isn’t always the message Clinton delivers. She was forced to apologize for saying that she would bring renewable energy to coal country and “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

“The Clinton plan is consistent in what we need to do and is in keeping with what other countries around the world are doing,” Edward Cameron, a policy lead at the nonprofit corporate environmental coalition We Mean Business, told HuffPost. “Even as we transition away from coal, we need to protect and safeguard coal communities by giving them different types of livelihood options than before.”

Still, Cameron said the success of Clinton’s plan would depend heavily on the West Virginia officials tasked with executing it.

“I have enough experience traveling around the world over the last 20 years or so working on international development to see that the places that transition well are the places with solid local government,” Cameron said.

Vox’s David Roberts, writing about Clinton's energy plan as a whole, pointed out that, “for better or worse, Clinton resists the call for policy moonshots. She wants a plan that can be implemented within the bounds of foreseeable political reality.”

Just try winning over a crowd of out-of-work coal miners with that line.

Alexander Kaufman contributed reporting.

The U.S. Is A Tax Haven. Obama Wants To Change That.

The Obama administration announced Friday that it will begin cracking down on common money laundering and tax evasion schemes in the aftermath of the Panama Papers leaks.

The Panama Papers, a trove of 11.5 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in early April, revealed the true owners of thousands of shell corporations set up by the law firm. Keeping money offshore is not always illegal, but is often done to avoid having to pay taxes on it back home.

What is less well-known is that the U.S. is itself a tax haven, with plenty of loopholes in the tax code to make its wealthiest citizens perfectly happy to park their money at home.

Obama said in a speech Friday he wants to change that.

.@POTUS just took a series of steps to combat money laundering, corruption, and tax evasion: https://t.co/vzff5yGpjT https://t.co/dyT4hEa4LV
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 6, 2016

While fully closing tax loopholes requires an act of Congress, the president outlined some ways the executive branch is working to do its part.

"It would make sure that families and small businesses who don't have fancy lawyers and fancy accountants are being treated the same as big corporations who do," Obama said in his speech Friday.

"In recent months we've seen just how big a problem corruption and tax evasion have become around the globe," he said.

"Combatting this kind of tax evasion and strengthening the global financial system have been priorities of mine since I took office, and they're part of our broader ongoing efforts to make sure that the rules aren't rigged and our economy works for everybody."

On Thursday, the Treasury Department announced a new rule that requires banks and other financial institutions to "collect and verify the personal information of the real people (also known as beneficial owners) who own, control, and profit from companies when those companies open accounts."

The White House's short explainer on the topic notes that "while the beneficial owners of shell companies often exploit weak rules in offshore tax havens, gaps also exist in U.S. tax rules that foreigners can currently exploit to set up and hide their assets or financial activity in an anonymous shell company in the United States."

U.S. Adds 160,000 Jobs In April, Smallest Gain In Seven Months

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy added the fewest number of jobs in seven months in April and Americans dropped out of the labor force in droves, signs of weakness that cast doubts on whether the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates before the end of the year.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 160,000 jobs last month as construction employment barely rose and the retail sector shed jobs, the Labor Department said on Friday.

That was the smallest gain since September and below the first-quarter average job growth of 200,000.

Employers added 19,000 fewer jobs in February and March than previously reported. While the unemployment rate held at 5.0 percent that was because people dropped out of the labor force.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls rising 202,000 last month and the jobless rate unchanged at 5 percent.

The stepdown in job growth could raise concerns that the weakness in overall economic activity was spilling over to the labor market. Economic growth slowed sharply in the first quarter this year.

Average hourly earnings were a bright spot in the employment report, rising eight cents or 0.3 percent last month. That took the year-on-year increase to 2.5 percent from 2.3 percent in March, still below the 3.0 percent advance that economists say is needed for inflation to rise to the Fed's 2.0 percent target.

The U.S. central bank last month offered a fairly upbeat assessment of the labor market, saying that conditions had "improved further."

The Fed raised its benchmark overnight interest rate in December for the first time in nearly a decade. Fed officials have forecast two more rate hikes for this year.

Market-based measures of Fed policy expectations have virtually priced out an interest rate increase at the Fed's June 14-15 meeting, according to CME Group's FedWatch. They see a less than 50 percent probability of rate hikes in September and November, with a 59 percent chance at the December meeting.

The labor force participation rate, or the share of working-age Americans who are employed or at least looking for a job, fell 0.2 percentage point to 62.8 percent. It had increased 0.6 percentage point since dipping to 62.4 percent in September.

The labor force fell by 362,000 as people dropped out in April.

The vast private services sector dominated employment gains in April. Manufacturing added 4,000 jobs last month after shedding 29,000 in March, the biggest loss for the sector since December 2009.

There were further job losses in mining as the energy sector adjusts to weak profits from a recent prolonged plunge in oil prices. Mining payrolls fell 8,000 last month. Mining employment has decreased by 191,000 jobs since peaking in September 2014, with 75 percent of the losses in support activities.

Gains in construction employment slowed sharply, with the sector adding 1,000 jobs in April, after home building showing some signs of fatigue last month.

Retail payrolls fell 3,100 after hefty gains in the first quarter, despite sluggish sales.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Powerball Lottery Jackpot Soars To $415 Million

(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.

The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.

The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.

Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.

The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.

According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.

Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.

Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.

The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.