Gov. Brown: Growth of Latino power paving way for policy changes

http://www.latimes.com/

California Gov. Jerry Brown said the growth of Latino power in California has paved the way for policy shifts. (Gregory Bull / Associated Press)

Patrick McGreevy contact the reporter

Jerry BrownPoliticsGovernmentPublic Officials

Growing power of Latinos in California is paving way for policy changes, Gov. Brown says

Two decades after California voters approved Proposition 187, barring public services to those in the country illegally, Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday that the political tide has turned in the state with a growing wave of Latino voters demanding more tolerant policy from Sacramento.

The power you represent is growing and it is growing in very important ways. - Gov. Jerry Brown

Speaking to hundreds of Latino elected officials from throughout the country holding a conference in San Diego, Brown said the shift in power has made possible public support for changes including his signing of legislation providing driver’s licenses to immigrants in the country illegally and providing them with scholarships and the right to practice law.
“The power you represent is growing and it is growing in very important ways,” Brown told the members of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort.
Brown went on to credit “the sheer power of the Latino community as it is felt in the towns and cities and counties up and down this state. That is the tide that is turning the political feelings and philosophy of state government.”

 

The governor cited the history of various groups controlling California as a lesson.
“The Mexicans threw out the Spanish around 1815, and then, of course, the gringos threw out the Mexicans in 1846, or 1848,” Brown said. “But the point is you never keep control forever. There’s always new waves coming so you’ve got to stay ahead of the wave."
"That’s what we call Brown power," he joked with a play on his name.
Brown also drew applause when he touted a new school-funding formula approved for the state two years ago.

• “But the point is you never keep control forever. There’s always new waves coming so you’ve got to stay ahead of the wave." SPOKEN AS THE TRUE PROGRESSIVE RACIST HE IS. IS it brown people he is referring to? And is it white power he is meekly surrendering? Why that is mighty white of you...
  Attilashrugs1
  at 10:46 AM July 01, 2014

“The school district gets more money based on the number of non-English-speaking families that have their children in our schools,” Brown said. “Because it’s not really justice to treat unequals equally. You have to do more to be able to create that opportunity and that pathway for those families that are not having the same skill of speaking English as others.”
State Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), who introduced Brown, praised the governor for his support of the growing number of Latino elected officials.
“It’s true we keep coming, and we have in Gov. Brown someone who embraces us when we keep coming,” Padilla told the audience.

America's Evolving Look: Census Shows White Deaths Outpace Births

 http://www.usnews.com/

Other factors underscoring a changing country include a baby boom in big cities.

By Katherine Peralta June 30, 2014 | 3:26 p.m. EDT + More

For the second year in a row, the number of non-Hispanic white deaths in 2013 outweighed the number of white births, signaling an increasingly older and diversified American public. It is a trend that’s likely to continue for a while, as traditionally minority groups become the majority of the U.S. population.
As a result of its slower growth rate, compared with other groups, the number of non-Hispanic white individuals declined to 62.6 percent of the total overall population in 2013 from 63 percent in 2012, according to recent figures from the Census Bureau.
“As we move forward we’re probably going to continue to have a natural decrease of whites because it’s an older population and eventually, maybe in 10 years or so, we’ll have a decline in the white population,” says William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “That’s a scenario I think we’ll see for a while.”
[READ: U.S. Probably Not Headed Toward Another Recession]
A previous report from the Census Bureau showed that the U.S. will become a majority-minority country for the first time in 2043, meaning the total number of black, Asian, Hispanic and other minority populations will outweigh the non-Hispanic white population, though that demographic will still make up the largest single group.

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The country as a whole grew a little bit older last year, led by a surge of the retiring-age American population and a much slower growth of younger generations. The median age for the U.S. as a whole edged up to 37.6 last year from 37.5 in 2012, Census figures showed. The age group 65 and older grew to 44.7 million in 2013, up 3.6 percent from 2012, while the population younger than 65 grew by just 0.3 percent.
Growth of the senior population will continue as baby boomers turn 65. In fact, says Richard Fry, an economist at the Pew Research Center, the biggest group of baby boomers was born in 1962, a sign it will still be some time before that largest group enters the 65-and-over category.
“We’re going to have a lot of growth in terms of absolute size [of the population of Americans 65 and older] for easily another dozen years,” he says.
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A separate report from the Census Bureau released Monday showed that the oldest population of Americans – which in 2010 was 12 times the size it was in 1990 – is more racially and ethnically diverse, with those identifying their race as white was 84.8 percent in 2010, down from 86.9 a decade earlier.
Brooking’s Frey points out that the growing diversification is mostly taking shape in younger generations, though, which comprise bigger numbers of minorities. The Census report showed that at a growth rate of 2.9 percent, Asians were the fastest growing group from 2012 to 2013, and the growth was driven by international migration. The Hispanic population, which is the second-largest group overall in size behind non-Hispanic single-race whites, grew 2.1 percent and was led instead by a natural increase, or more births than deaths.

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Overall fertility rates have declined in the U.S. as a whole and especially for white Americans, according to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics. This helps temper the growth rate of the white non-Hispanic and Hispanic populations, Frey says.
Extrapolating from the census data, a separate report from San Francisco-based real estate research firm Trulia Inc. showed where different age groups lived in 2013. Contrary to popular thought, millennials – Americans 20 to 34 years old – actually moved more into big-city suburbs and lower-density cities rather than dense urban areas. The three fastest growing millennial metropolitan areas were Peabody, Massachusetts, a town north of Boston, Colorado Springs, Colorado and San Antonio.
Americans 50 to 69 years old also flocked most to the “second quartile of counties,” wrote Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko, or big city suburbs and lower density cities. The fastest growing areas for baby boomers were Austin, Texas, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dallas – all places that already have high concentrations of young people. In fact, Austin has the highest share of millennials than any other large metropolitan area, the Trulia report showed.
[MORE: Immigrants Are No Longer the Biggest Share of the Latino Labor Force]
“The trend in the past year was that boomer growth [took place] in millennials’ favorite places,” Kolko says.
The population of the youngest Americans, or those ages 5 and younger, grew fastest in big cities like Washington, D.C. and New York. Frey has studied demographic changes in New York and says since 2010, there’s been a growth in the under 5 population in all of the boroughs except for Staten Island.
“What you’re seeing here is whites back then were only growing in Manhattan and Brooklyn as yuppies were moving in and having kids,” he says. “But now we see white gains [in under 5 age group] … in Queens and the Bronx, so there’s probably some gentrifying of whites moving into those boroughs, which were not necessarily the hot spots for kids.”

Americans Giving Up Passports Jump Sixfold as Tougher Rules Loom

   By Dylan Griffiths | Bloomberg – Fri, Aug 9, 2013 6:59 AM EDT
 

Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier as the government prepares to introduce tougher asset-disclosure rules.
Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to 1,131 in the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register figures published today. That brought the first-half total to 1,810 compared with 235 for the whole of 2008.

The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport.

"With the looming deadline for Fatca, more and more U.S. citizens are becoming aware that they have U.S. tax reporting obligations," said Matthew Ledvina, a U.S. tax lawyer at Anaford AG in Zurich. "Once aware, they decide to renounce their U.S. citizenship."
Fatca requires foreign financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service information about financial accounts held by U.S. taxpayers, or held by foreign entities in which U.S. taxpayers hold a substantial ownership interest. It was estimated to generate $8.7 billion over 10 years, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Delaying Implementation
The 2010 Fatca law requires banks to withhold 30 percent from "certain U.S.-connected payments" to some accounts of American clients who don't disclose enough information to the IRS. While banks can sign agreements to report to the IRS individually, many are precluded from doing so by privacy laws in their jurisdictions.
The Treasury Department last month announced that the IRS will delay the start of Fatca by six months until July 1, 2014, to give foreign banks time to comply with the law. The extension of the act follows a previous one-year delay announced in 2011.
Financial institutions including Canada's Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) and Allianz SE of Germany have expressed concerns that Fatca is too complex.
The latest delay comes after the Swiss government agreed in February to simplifications that will help the country's banks implement Fatca.

Penalty Threat
"The United States wishes to ensure that all income earned worldwide by U.S. taxpayers on accounts held abroad can be taxed by the United States," the Swiss government said on April 10.
Since 2011, Americans, who disclose their non-U.S. bank accounts to the IRS, must file the more expansive 8938 form that asks for all foreign financial assets, including insurance contracts, loans and shareholdings in non-UNN.S. companies.
Failure to file the 8938 form can result in a fine of as much as $50,000. Clients can also be penalized half the amount in an undeclared foreign bank account under the Banks Secrecy Act of 1970.
The implementation of Fatca from July next year comes after UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, paid a $780 million penalty in 2009 and handed over data on about 4,700 accounts to settle a tax-evasion dispute with the U.S. Whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld was sentenced to 40 months in a U.S. prison in 2009 after informing the government and Senate about his American clients at the Geneva branch of Zurich-based UBS AG.

Compliance Costs
The additional compliance costs for companies to ensure that Americans they hire are filing the correct U.S. tax returns and asset-declaration forms are at least $5,000 per person, said Ledvina.
For individuals, the costs are also rising. Getting a mortgage or acquiring life insurance is becoming almost impossible for American citizens living overseas, Ledvina said.
"With increased U.S. tax reporting, U.S. accounting costs alone are around $2,000 per year for a U.S. citizen residing abroad," the tax lawyer said. "Adding factors, such as difficulty in finding a bank to accept a U.S. citizen as a client, it is difficult to justify keeping the U.S. citizenship for those who reside permanently abroad."

Americans Renouncing Citizenship Surge 66%

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/08/2013 15:40 -0400

Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,
A massive 1,131 individuals renounced their US citizenship last quarter, according to data that has yet to be officially released (though I was able to procure an advanced copy).
This is a HUGE jump.
Compared to the same quarter last year in which 188 people renounced their US citizenship, this year’s number is over SIX TIMES higher.
Not to mention, it's 66.5% higher than last quarter's 679 renunciations.
This brings the total number of renunciations so far this year to 1,810.
While still embryonic, it's difficult to ignore this trend– more and more people are starting to renounce their US citizenship.
After all, the number of people who renounced citizenship this past quarter is roughly the same as the number of people who renounced for the previous four quarters COMBINED.
This movement shouldn't be that surprising for a species that began as nomadic hunter gatherers, or for a society that was founded by foreigner settlers in search of a better life.
Yet, in a rather anomalous twist, the emotional ties we have for our passports are incredibly strong.
It doesn’t matter where you’re from - the United States, Sweden, New Zealand, or Venezuela... many people all over the world are inculcated from birth with a sense that their country is ‘better’ than all the others.
We grow up with the songs, the flag waving, and the parades until the concept of motherland becomes deeply rooted in our emotional cores.
Not to mention, when so many of our friends and neighbors unquestionably fall in line, it’s a powerful social reinforcement that only strengthens the bond.
We come to view our nationalities rather ironically as a big piece of our core individuality. I am an American. I am a Canadian. I am an Austrian. Instead of - I am a human being.
It has taken decades... centuries even... to reach this point. So the fact that more and more people are making the gut-wrenching decision to ditch their US passports is truly a powerful trend.
So what’s driving it? Taxes... and the search for liberty.
For many, their tax bills constitute a financial breaking point. Particularly for people who spend most of their time outside of the United States and are constantly hamstrung by worldwide taxation and information disclosures, the burden for many of them has just become too much to bear.
The US government figured this out some years ago and began charging an exit tax to certain high income / high net worth expatriates seeking to renounce.
This applies to anyone whose average US tax liability over the last five years was about $150,000 (the equivalent of roughly $500,000 in taxable income in 2012 dollars), and/or has a net worth of at least $2 million on the date of expatriation. Curiously this net worth figure does not adjust with inflation.
The ironic thing is that in the "Act of July 27, 1868", the United States Congress declared that "the right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Yet I would expect that as the number of expatriates continue to grow, this exit tax will become more and more onerous as the government tries to trap people, and their wealth, in the country.