wandering stars

The German government will exempt some 1,550 industrial companies from electricity cost increases in 2013, SPIEGEL has learned.

The Federal Office for Economics and Export Control informed the firms in mid-December that they won’t have to pay a special charge imposed on electricity customers under the country’s Renewable Energy Act to help cover the cost of expanding the production of energy from renewable sources.

The opposition Green Party estimates that the companies will save up to €4 billion ($5.3 billion) as a result. The electricity bills for private energy customers and smaller businesses will increase by a commensurate amount.

Kiki’s favorite treat is fruit, usually pears or watermelon. He wears specially made Italian cashmere when it’s cold. He is very well-travelled, and like all New York dogs likes an exotic vacation now and then.

In Naples one year, a restaurant said to Beatrice: “Madam you know you are very famous in Santa Lucia.”

She blushed and felt flattered, she says, until the man announced: “But not for you, for your dog.”

In the office area, a young bride-to-be and her mother are poring over books of photographs: cakes in blue and pink, covered in edible lace; Art Deco cakes in black and silver; cakes with roses and lilies and golden orchids; cakes with seven tiers, or floating tiers, the flowers tumbling out with an impossible disregard for gravity.

For these days, the cake’s the thing. After the dress, the cake is central to the current ubiquitous obsession with weddings, with brides and grooms ready to drop 10, 15, even 17 grand ($17,000) on a Ben-Israel design.

For example, the banks can wipe out more than $2 billion of their obligation by donating or demolishing abandoned houses. Almost $1 billion can be used to help families that have already defaulted move out.

“The $17 billion is supposed to be the teeth of this settlement,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the former inspector general for the Treasury’s bank bailout fund known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “And yet they are getting all this credit for practices that they do every day.”

Only 60 percent of the $17 billion designated for borrowers, or $10.2 billion, must be used to reduce principal for borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth — though banks can do more if they choose.

Given this unprecedented concentration of wealth—and considering what the nation needs to do to rebuild our schools and infrastructure while at the same time saving Medicare and reducing the long-term budget deficit—shouldn’t we be aiming higher than a “Buffet tax” on the incomes of millionaires?

Facebook anticipates its deduction will be so large that it will wipe out the company’s tax obligations for all of 2011, according to the firm’s regulatory filing for its initial public offering. The company also expects to get as much as $500 million in refunds applied to the taxes it paid over the last two years.

All of this is legal. Under current law, companies can take a deduction when employees cash in stock options. The thinking is that compensating employees with stock options is an expense for companies that the government wants to offset.

LUZ SMEDBRON—a disabled mother of three and an American citizen originally from Ecuador—along with about a dozen housing rights advocates, stood together on Smedbons’ porch in Addison, Ill., on July 29. With protest signs in hand, they chanted, “The people united, will never be defeated!”

As DuPage County sheriffs moved in, protesters stood their ground. As news cameras arrived on the scene, the officers slunk back to their patrol cars, looking confused and embarrassed. They radioed for reinforcements.

The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Hispanic households, according to an analysis of newly available 2009 government data by the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank.

The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago, with the gulf separating whites from other groups twice as wide as it was in the two decades prior to the recession and 2008 financial crisis, according to the study.