#AND I DESPERATELY WANT TRAINS TO BE TAX FUNDED SO I CAN GO ALL SORTS OF PLACES AND SEE ALL SORTS OF STUFF AND A HANDFUL OF IMPORTANT PEOPLE?

[suffewingowo]

Like an impenetrable curtain the fog hangs in front of me. Lights of oncoming cars fading into view only for them to disappear again as the brights are flicked off.

Even through the all consuming fog, the darkness of the nighttime, I am comforted by some deep, welling, feeling.

I do not fear the creatures of the wilds coming into view and totalling my car. Nor another driver, absent-minded, on their phone swerving into my lane.

As I approach the city, only darkness greets me, until all at once the blue lights of the street lamps are thrust into my vision again.

The shroud of the stars above me is still present, even when they move unseen behind the curtain of fog.

[bts-bay-bee]

blue

↳ pairing: park jimin x reader

↳ genre: smut, fluff, a tiny bit of angst if you squint

↳ summary: teaching your cold boss to love might just be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.

↳ warnings: CEO!jimin, cold!jimin, dom!jimin, assistant!reader, cursing, male masturbation, fantasizing (?), vaginal fingering, oral (male and female receiving), cum eating, marking, daddy kink, pussy slapping, praise kink (kinda?), choking, handcuffs, nipple clamps, clit massager, multiple orgasms, creampie, unprotected sex (wrap it before you tap it), degradation (slight)

↳ word count: 13 066

↳ meaning of blue: heaven. authority. cold. wet. slow. depression. trust. intelligence.

“Is he here yet?” You asked, out of breath as you ran to your desk at work. The office secretary shook her head, no, making you sigh out in relief. You had been massively late for work which ended up with you running up the many flights of stairs – in heels – deeming the elevator too slow to get you to your office.

 You flashed the office secretary a huge smile, hoping that would further prod her to cover up for your tardiness, before walking over to your office, which was conveniently located right next to your boss’s much larger, much sleeker office.

 Park Jimin had been your boss for the better part of five years now. You had undertaken the job when you had finished high school, looking for anything and everything to bring any amount of money into your bank account. University tuition fee statements were your personal version of hell; the obscenely large number crushed any of the dreams you once had. But then came along Mr Park.

 When he had seen your curriculum vitae, he had immediately been intrigued. Back then he wasn’t CEO of the company, but he had started to quickly move up the proverbial ranks, which allowed him to finally acquire a personal assistant to handle the lesser tasks. A high school graduate – with straight A’s in every subject – hadn’t chosen to go to college? That’s what had made him so intrigued with you. In a few short hours after he had first reviewed your resume, you had gone through a short telephonic interview then you had been asked to come in for a trial period. One which you had passed with flying colours.

 Jimin couldn’t help himself but ask about your lack of tertiary education. With a flushed face and shaking hands, you embarrassedly told him about your lack of funds. It was only embarrassing because here you were talking about your financial issues to a man who had a year’s worth of tuition on his wrist in the form of a shiny gold Rolex. Another year’s worth of tuition was probably wrapped around his ring finger, because of course no man as rich, successful and not to mention handsome wouldn’t have a wedding ring on.

 Jimin’s wife, Irene – who you had only met a handful of times – was the complete opposite of the warm, caring man. She was cold and distant, even towards her husband, who was supposedly her high school sweetheart. How they managed to stay together for so long boggled your mind. Slowly, you started to see Jimin change. His once fond smile slowly disappeared, now being replaced by a cold, grim straight line. He stopped caring about the people he worked with. He even began to sneer at lesser workers, not bothering to greet the janitors or the office secretary.

 Sitting at your shiny, mahogany desk you began to review emails for Jimin, sifting through the numerous subject lines and forwarding the emails to him so that he could take care of them. At around 10am you left your desk, realising that you had to make Jimin coffee. After adding the espresso shot and steamed milk into the coffee mug, you walked to the large door of Jimin’s office, knocking three times before waiting for a response.

 “Enter.” His voice was clipped, meaning he was already in a foul mood.

 You quietly pushed down the door handle and entered, your eyes trained on the floor as you made your way to his desk. Without speaking you placed the steaming cup of coffee in front of him, then began to make your way back to your office. Jimin hadn’t taken his eyes off of his large LCD screen, not paying you any attention. However, before you could take a step away from him, his cold, hard voice reached your ears.

 “Take a seat, Miss L/N.”

 Oh, you were screwed. There was no two ways about it.

 “Yes, Sir.”

 He never told you to sit after bringing him his coffee. Taking a deep breath, you turned back to face him and took a seat on the edge of the plush chairs. Jimin’s cold eyes still trailed over his monitor, making you squirm slightly from awkwardness. What did he want? He hadn’t asked you to sit with him since… Well, since before he was married. This just wasn’t something you did anymore.

 After what seemed like hours, he lifted his eyes from the harshly lit screen, bring his eyes to your own. Flushing a light shade of pink, you cleared your throat and looked down again. You didn’t want to disrespect him by staring right back at him.

 “Where’s your coffee?” He quietly asked, picking up his mug.

 “I, uh… I didn’t make myself any, Sir.” You replied, eyes trained on your twiddling thumbs. He sighed, rolling his chair back slightly so that he was more comfortable.

 “Don’t you want to go make yourself a cup? I need to speak to you about something.” Jimin said, loosening the tie he had dawned today slightly. You were frozen in the leather chair – had you done something wrong? Was he going to fire you? He noticed you hadn’t moved, which caused him to frown. “Is the idea of drinking coffee with me really that appalling, Y/N?”

 “No! I just…” You began, wringing your hands nervously, your eyes still not leaving them. “Are you going to fire me?”

 Jimin looked at you, stunned. “Why would think that?”

 “Well… I was a little late for work today, and you asked me to sit down. You don’t ask me to sit down and have coffee with you, Sir. It was almost as if you were going to give me bad news.”

 “I used to always ask you to have coffee with me, Y/N.” He replied, frowning slightly. He knew that you used to have coffee with him on a daily basis, usually to discuss the work for the day, but coffee, nonetheless. He also knew that at one point you used to meet his eyes when you spoke to him. When did that change? “Why aren’t you looking at me?”

 “What did you want to talk to me about?” You asked, avoiding his question that you had no nice answer to. Did he really want to hear that his wife berated you repeatedly for working with him so closely? For looking at him when he spoke to you, and vice versa?

 Jimin eyed you warily. “Are you sure you don’t want coffee?” You nodded wordlessly, only making him deepen his frown. Nevertheless, he ploughed on, settling on the fact that this was now what your relationship had been reduced to. “I have a promotion of sorts for you. Well, in actual fact, it’s just a favour for me. A rather large favour.”

 “Sir?” You prodded, urging him to speak when he had stopped. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes out of sheer tiredness. He had been awake all night, thinking about how to ask you this.

 “As you know, Irene and I have been separated for some time now.” He began, making you reel with shock. When did they split up?! And why did he think that you knew about it? “We recently decided to finalise it and get a divorce. She left last week. She left Ezra with me.”

 Ezra is Jimin’s five-year-old son. Despite his mother being an absolute witch and his father turning colder with each passing day, he was still a respectful boy. Like Irene, you hadn’t really seen him that many times.

 “I’m… I’m sorry.” You softly replied, not knowing what else to say. Where was this going? “I didn’t know this had been happening, Sir.”

 Jimin shrugged, not really worried about the fact that he was divorced. That’s not what had been bothering him. “It’s not a big deal. It’s not like we were ever actually in love. Anyway, Irene isn’t what I need to speak to you about. It’s Ezra.”

 “I’m sure this has been very taxing on him too.” Your voice was barely above a whisper. You still didn’t know where this was going, and it was driving you crazy.

 “He’s too young to really understand what’s been happening.” He replied, his jaw clenched, angry at himself for not being able to articulate why he so desperately needed your help.

 “I, um… I’m not really the domestic type. I don’t know how to cook. I don’t know how to take care of a child. I’ve been dropping Ezra off at my parents every day since Irene left, but I don’t want him to grow up spending most of his day at someone else’s house. He should be at his home. And, I know, I can hire someone to babysit him, but he’s still so young to be left with strangers, and I don’t want to put his life in unnecessary danger. I mean, you never know what these people could be behind a façade –”

 “Sir, where do I fit in?” You asked, amused at his rambling. This isn’t the cold CEO that you became used of. This was the old Jimin, the Jimin that had actually been interested about his employees, regardless of the amount on their pay cheque.

 He cleared his throat, a slight blush on his cheeks. “I know that you’re not under any obligation to help me, but I trust you more than anyone else in my life, Y/N. I need… I need someone to help me with Ezra. Not just with Ezra, but with the whole domestic thing.”

 “Mr Park, I still don’t know where I fit in.” You said soothingly, getting somewhat of an idea of what he was asking you.

 He ran his hand though his styled blonde hair in exasperation. Why couldn’t he just say what he needed from you? “Move in with me.” Shit. That’s not how he had meant to phrase it.

 You choked on nothing; the way he had blurted it out had surprised you, which ended up with you looking up at him with watery eyes from a lack of oxygen. He immediately jumped out of his chair and rushed over to you, lightly tapping your back until you could breathe easily again. Having him this close to you made you even more nervous than you already were. After your choking ordeal was over, he surprised you by taking a seat next to you instead of going to the other side of the desk. His cologne wafted over you, dosing you in his masculine scent. It honestly made you more nervous that you already were.

 “Move in with you?” You repeated, in a small voice. Jimin looked mortified at your reaction, mentally bashing himself for even thinking of asking you this. But he was already in too deep to change the narrative.

 You swallowed the lump in your throat. Obviously, you wanted to help him – you want to help everyone around you. It was just who you were as a person. But how would it look? The world you lived in was a rather nasty, judgemental one.

 “Sir… Forgive me for speaking out of turn, but what would people think? You barely finalised your divorce and you already have another woman moving in?”

 “Just temporarily.” He weakly replied, embarrassment showing on his cheeks. “Of course, I know that this is such a huge favour to ask, I know it’s odd, but I wouldn’t be asking this of you if I wasn’t completely out of options.”

 You bit your lower lip, then sighed. Curse your soft heart. Running a hand through your hair, you nodded to him. “We have a lot more to discuss, but when can I move in?”

 ***

 “This is the living room… This is the kitchen… Your bedroom is upstairs, next to mine.” Jimin timidly said, scratching the back of his reddened neck. This nervous side of Jimin was quite new, and you’d be lying if you said that it didn’t make you amused. Ever since you drove into the driveway five minutes ago, he had been stumbling over his words, tripping over nothing and wringing his hands.

 “Sir, are you okay?” You asked before you could stop yourself. He caught your eye, opening his mouth to brush you off, but was left speechless when you didn’t shy away from his gaze. His mouth curved into a soft smile, realising that it was just you. There was no reason to be a nervous, rambling mess.

 “I’m fine, Y/N.” He murmured, seeing the way your eyes danced with amusement. Who would’ve thought that the cold, cutthroat CEO would be rendered speechless from having his personal assistant in his home? “I’ve been thinking… I mean, you are essentially going to be living here for a while. I don’t want you to feel as if you’re forced to maintain a professional persona the entire time. Call me Jimin.”

 “Okay, Si – Jimin.” You replied, quickly catching yourself. The feel of his name on your tongue foreign yet… Right. Jimin smiled at you, his nervousness of having you in his house now forgotten. Who would’ve thought that all it took to get rid of them was just one look into your eyes? But now his stomach was twisting for a different reason. Why did it flip when you said his name?

 “Where’s Ezra?” Your question hung in the air as he abandoned any thought about the butterflies wreaking havoc in the pit of his tummy. Almost as if saying his name summoned him, the boy suddenly appeared to walk down the stairs. His dark hair was greatly contrasted by his honeyed skin; his cheeks so full that they gently shook with every step he took. Ezra was truly the miniature version of Jimin.

 He bowed to his father almost a little too fast, making you raise your eyebrow. Upon setting his eyes on his son, Jimin stood up even straighter than he already was and lifted his chin, regarding Ezra with cold eyes.

 “This is Y/N.” Jimin told the young boy, his jaw clenched. Jimin almost seemed angry at Ezra. “She’s going to be helping us while your mother is away.”

 ***

 “Good morning, Ezra.” You sang softly as you slowly opened the curtains in his bedroom. You saw his eyes peak up at you through the covers of his grey blanket, then abruptly squint when the sun’s rays hit them. “Did you sleep well?”

 “Hmm.” He mumbled, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The long sleeves of his blue pyjamas flopped over the tips of his fingers, only increasing the cuteness currently assaulting your eyes. You smiled at him, hoping that today was the day that he completely opened up to you – having already been here for two weeks surely must’ve made him somewhat comfortable with you, right?

 “How about after you get bathed and changed, we have pancakes for breakfast?” You suggested as you ran your hands through his messy bedhead, smoothing the black tufts of hair. Ezra said nothing, instead he nodded at you, sleep still quite evident in his eyes.

 After tidying up Ezra’s room, you walked into the kitchen with the intent of making some coffee for Jimin and yourself. As you put a couple scoops of ground coffee beans in the machine, you began prepping the ingredients for breakfast. If you worked fast enough, Jimin might be able to eat before he goes to the office. Humming as you gracefully moved throughout the kitchen, you quickly lost track of time.

 “Are you… Making pancakes?” Jimin incredulously asked, eyes sweeping over the stack of pancakes that he found next to you on the counter. You hummed, flashing him a small smile, before going back to flipping the golden pancakes in front of you.

 This was the first time that he had seen you in your natural state – usually you were already showered and changed before he even woke up, but today you just didn’t feel like keeping up the pretence. You were basically going to be living here for a couple more weeks – you didn’t feel like faking how organised you were as soon as you woke up. Even though you did feel kind of insecure and quite frankly embarrassed about the way you were dressed at the moment, Jimin felt totally different. Of course, he knew that you were gorgeous, but with your hair pulled in a messy bun and your thighs on display thanks to your sleeping shorts, Jimin just couldn’t help but stare at you.

 His eyes studied the exposed flesh of your legs, unknowingly biting his plump lip when you turned around to get something from the cupboard behind you. Jimin only tore his eyes away from your unmarred skin when Ezra climbed onto the stool next to him.

 You smiled at Ezra as you placed a stack of pancakes in front of him, the breath-taking curve of your pink lips were enough to make Jimin reciprocate the action, even though it wasn’t even being directed at him. When did he become to enamoured with you? Was it when you agreed to help him in his desperate time of need, or long before that? He couldn’t help but think that you were somewhat like a guardian angel – his own, personal angel, who makes his day a little brighter.

 “Jimin? Jimin? Jimin!” You called, trying to capture his attention. He had spaced out, not realising that both you and Ezra had been attempting to talk to him. You nudged his shoulder gently, causing him to finally get out of his daydream and look at you confused. “We’ve been trying to speak to you. You kind of entered your own world there.” You explained to him, unable to prevent the tiny laughter from leaving your mouth.

 Ezra had long since given up trying to talk to his father; any five year old child would want their father’s attention, but Ezra (even at his tender age) knew that his relationship with Jimin was somewhat strained; his father had already been corrupted by the cold CEO attitude to ever give him any attention. This was why Ezra was already almost done with his stack of pancakes – he didn’t want to spend any more time with Jimin than needed. Well, he knew that Jimin didn’t want to spend any more time with him than needed.

 “I’m sorry, I was… Thinking.” Jimin apologised sheepishly, making Ezra confused. For as long as he had been alive, he hadn’t heard his father utter an apology. Not even to his mother. But Ezra was already confused – not once had his mother ever made him breakfast, let alone eat breakfast together. Was this what a normal family did every day? “What were you saying, Y/N?”

 “I was wondering if it would be okay for me to take Ezra to the craft store today.” You repeated, nervously. “Ezra likes to draw and paint, and so do I, so I wanted to get us some more supplies –” Jimin didn’t even wait for you to finish before sliding his credit card over to you, making you look at him confused. “I wasn’t hinting for money, Sir, I just wanted to take Ezra with me.”

 “I know, but please take it.” He murmured, dropping his gaze to the delectable stack of food in front of him. “And what did we talk about, Y/N? Stop calling me Sir. I’m not your boss here. Think of this as your home.”

 “It’s just a habit…” You awkwardly explained, trying not to make too much a fool of yourself, as Ezra hopped down the chair and went to wash his hands. “It feels disrespectful to call you anything other than Sir.”

 “I remember that you used to call me Chim before.” He muttered, thinking back to when you had first started at the company. You had been so playful with him, something that he misses dearly. His admission made you blush a deep scarlet. How did he even remember something as trivial as a stupid nickname?

 As you opened your mouth to respond, you heard Ezra struggling to reach the faucet in the basin. Before you could turn to help him, he frantically hit the tap falling to the floor, subsequently turning the water on to a very high pressure. You suddenly felt water spray everywhere, falling all over the granite top, the floor, as well as you and Ezra.

 You quickly shut the tap off, ignoring the water dripping down your face and checked to see if Ezra was fine.

 “Are you okay, baby?” You murmured, wiping the water off of his face as his eyes filled with tears. “Did you get hurt?”

 “Why didn’t you ask one of us for help?” Jimin asked in a firm voice, anger obviously showing on his face and in his voice. “Now look at what you’ve done!”

 Ezra doesn’t respond to either of you. Instead, he took one look at Jimin’s face and ran out the kitchen, tears streaming down his face. You stood up and looked at Jimin in disbelief.

 “It was just a mistake, Jimin. There was no need for you to speak to him like that.” You said stiffly, trying not to let your irritation shine through. You turned away from him, quickly cleaning up the water before ignoring Jimin’s silence and walking up the stairs into Ezra’s room.

 Jimin really didn’t mean to do what he did. It came from years and years of being forced to be strict and abrupt with his employees. He meant to tell you that – he really did. But when you angrily snapped at him with a soaking wet, white shirt, he lost all train of thought. The water had turned the material see-through, showing off your plump tits, even flaunting the darker ring of your nipple. He was so lucky you were not there to see him frozen, mind unable to function from seeing your breasts.

 ‘Stop acting like some fucking schoolboy,’ he chided himself as he fixed his semi-hard length through his slacks, ‘you got hard after seeing her tits, for God’s sake. Pull yourself together.’

 After checking the coast to make sure it was clear, he all but ran back into his room, hoping to hide his slightly stiffened member from you. As Jimin walked past Ezra’s room, he heard you soothingly reassuring the child that he hadn’t meant to shout at him. Hearing the way you had to quieten Ezra made his heart clench – you barely knew his son, yet you were comforting him after one of Jimin’s many outbursts. Of course Jimin didn’t want to compare you and Irene, the two relationships you shared with Jimin and Ezra were completely different, but she never cared for Ezra the way you do. She never bothered to notice that Ezra had been interested in art; hell, even he hadn’t noticed that.

 Thoughts of how loving you are, how much you cared about people, filled his head for the rest of the day. His employees and business partners must’ve thought he had completely lost his mind: Jimin’s face had this faraway look the entire day, only changing when his mind decided to remind him just how delectable you looked this morning.

 Jimin had been so out of it, so infatuated by you, he decided that there was no use being at work anymore. He wasn’t getting anything done anyway so that’s how he found himself driving back home early, subconsciously wanting to be back in your presence immediately.

 “Y/N?” He called as he walked through the front door, loosening his tie. Not hearing your voice in response made him frown; you were usually waiting in the living room to greet him, with a steaming cup of coffee in hand and a bright, dazzling smile on your lips. He could care less about the coffee if he’s being honest. “Y/N, where are you?”

 Silence once again met his ears causing him to frown deeper. Worry suddenly filled his every orifice. Immediately fishing his phone out of his pocket, his fingers almost went on autopilot, dialling your number before pressing the phone to his ear. His heart pounded in his chest when you didn’t pick up by the second ring. Where had you gone?

 “Hello?”

 “Y/N? Are you okay?! Where are you?” Jimin said loudly, almost yelling. His tone made you confused; you had told him that you were taking Ezra out today. Why was he so frantic?

 “I’m fine, Jimin. Ezra and I just picked up some stuff from the store. Why are you asking?”

“I thought…” He couldn’t even finish the rest of his sentence because he didn’t know what he had thought. He cleared his throat, trying to clear your mind. “Never mind. Are you on your way back?”

 After you reassured Jimin that you were indeed coming back soon, he let out a sigh of relief and ended the call. He didn’t know why, but not coming home to you felt… Wrong. You had only been here for two weeks, yet he can’t imagine living in this house without you; he sure as hell couldn’t figure out how he lived here with the emotionless statue that was Irene.

 Jimin walked past into the kitchen with the intention of getting himself a snack but his eyes drifted to the sink, his mind betraying him by vividly reminding him of the way you looked this morning. God, the way your shirt had stuck to you, tempting him with the subtle curve of your waist, your voluptuous tits… Not to mention the way you had looked at him sternly. Everything about you made his head spin. Everything about you seemingly sent a rush of blood down to his cock.

 Biting his lip, his mind veered into uncharted territory by imagining just how good you looked without the dripping wet shirt. He imagined kissing down your body, marking you as his, and his alone, then spreading your legs, suckling on your needy clit…

 Before he knew it, Jimin was rock hard in his slacks from the mere thought of you for the second time today. He groaned when he felt his stiffness, irritated with himself because now he knew he had to get himself off, and he hated it. Jimin had only his hand to keep him company for the better part of two years now – himself and Irene hadn’t engaging in sexual activity whilst separated, despite living in the same house, and he couldn’t bring himself to bed anyone else whilst still legally married. Other than that, he found it humiliating to buy a sex toy in person, or even online – his company’s IT people could probably see his search history if they tried hard enough.

 Jimin sighed, knowing that his erection was solely his fault. He trudged up the stairs, situating himself in his en-suite bathroom, before turning the shower on. He hated jacking off, but he might as well make the clean-up easy. Stripping out of his work clothes he quickly hopped into the shower, trying to ignore the almost painful stiffness protruding from his body.

 Leaning his back and head against the tiled wall behind him, he allowed the water to cascade over him, relishing in the steaming hot water that soothed him. Jimin tried to not touch his boner for as long as he could but five minutes into the shower, he just couldn’t stop himself from gently stroking himself. He grabbed his shower gel, foaming up his hands so that it would be easier to jack himself off.

 “Oh, fuck!” He groaned, taking his curved length into his slippery palm, moving back and forth on the sensitive flesh. Continuing the motion, he applied more pressure around his cock, relishing in the feeling of getting himself off. But he so wished it were you.

 He wished it were your wet pussy squeezing and clenching around his dick, gripping him like a vice. He wished he could wrap your legs around his waist and pound into you, pulling on your hair and sucking on your neck, leaving deep purple marks so that everyone knew you were his. He wished he could paint the inside of your dripping cunt with his cum, making you hold it in and walk around the office with no panties, seeing evidence of his climax slowly drip down your legs.

 “God, Y/N…” Jimin whined, his usually steely voice reduced to a pitched, needy moan. He wanted you so fucking badly, and he was so fucking close. His hand moved with a mind of its own – it doubled its speed, exerting itself to relieve Jimin. Throaty groans left his plump lips, bouncing off of the tiles and echoing throughout the bathroom. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

 Somehow squeezing tighter around his pulsating cock, he got more frantic. Jimin began bucking into his fist, ignoring how his wet hair stuck to his forehead. After a few more seconds of fucking into his hand, he let out a growl, his cum squirting up and landing on his toned stomach. “Y/N, I’m coming!”

 ***

 “Why don’t you go up to your room.” You suggested to Ezra, ruffling his hair lightly as you walked into Jimin’s living room. He leaned into your touch, clearly affection-starved, making you frown. You’d have to talk to Jimin about that. You noticed just how cold and strict Jimin was with Ezra; of course it wasn’t your place to say anything about how someone raises their child, but it did become your place when said child has to look for comfort from you.

 “Are you going to come paint with me?” Ezra asked timidly, one hand gripping the shopping bag filled with art supplies, while the other gripped your hand tightly, not wanting to let go.

 “In a little bit, sweetheart.” You murmured, walking up the staircase that lead to the rooms. “Go set up. I just need to talk to your father about something.”

 He nodded, only leaving your hand when you walked past his bedroom. You walked to the end of the hallway, planning on giving Jimin a piece of your mind for being so unloving towards Ezra. Without knocking, you entered the room hoping to find Jimin laying on his bed or something, but he was nowhere to be found.

 “Sir?” You said quietly, before berating himself. Hadn’t he told you not to call him that? You cleared your throat, steeling your voice before calling loudly again.  “Jimin?”

 As you walked further into his room, you heard the shower running, indicating that he was already occupied. You decided to talk to him later, so you turned on your heel and began to walk out the room. Suddenly, you heard Jimin’s voice. “Y/N, I’m coming!”

 Huh. Okay. Guess he was cutting his shower short for you.

 You sat on the edge of his bed, elbow resting on your crossed legs and chin resting on your open palm. What if you were about to say something hurtful and he decided that he didn’t need you anymore? Maybe this was a bad idea.

 In a split second, you decided that this conversation could happen another day, so you started to make your way out of his room. As you were about to lift yourself off of the luxurious bed, the bathroom door opened, letting steam escape the bathroom, and also allowing you to see your boss.

 Your jaw dropped open seeing Jimin in nothing but a white towel covering his lower body. Water droplets streaked down his chest, down to his toned abs. Upon seeing them, you felt your mouth go completely dry… Oh god, his body looked like it was carved by the gods themselves. Jimin looked shocked, almost panicked by your presence, which was weird since he had told you he was coming out of his shower.

 “I, um… I needed to talk to you.” You said, quickly, standing up hurriedly. “I was about to leave and then you said you’d be coming out the shower. I just assumed you wanted me to wait for you.” Jimin’s cheeks were tinged red, probably from the hot shower, paired with his second-hand embarrassment from you. “I’m sorry. I’ll just speak to you later. I’ll be in Ezra’s room if you need me.”

 And with that, you practically ran out of Jimin’s room. You didn’t realise that you didn’t allow him to get a word in. Speed walking to Ezra’s room, you felt your cheeks heat up from extreme embarrassment – how, just how, did you think it was appropriate to check out your boss? Sure, you were living in his house, but it’s totally a different thing.

 “Y/N?” Ezra called, confused when you rushed into his room and shut the door behind you quickly. You quickly took a deep breath to calm your radical breathing, then turned to the young child, putting on a dazzling smile.

 “Yes, sweetheart?” You replied, seeing a smile forming on his lips due to your own. Your eyes drifted to the painting supplies that he had spread in front of him, all untouched, because he was waiting for you to paint with him.

 “Did father give you work? Or can you come paint with me?” He timidly said, eyes full of hope. You felt your smile turn tender; you know that you only spent a few weeks with him, but Ezra had completely captured your heart. But paired with your tenderness, you felt yourself feel a pang of sadness: Ezra never called Jimin anything other than ‘father’. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it just showed that their relationship wasn’t the best, nor were they the closest. God, how can you think about fixing their relationship when you were drooling over his father five seconds ago? You’re pathetic.

 “I came to paint with you.” You reassured, swallowing hard to try and get that delicious image of Jimin out of your mind.

 ***

 After you left, Jimin sat on the edge of his bed, extremely embarrassed that you had heard him jacking off. Sure, you didn’t exactly figure it out, but you had heard him nonetheless. He quickly found himself regretting doing what he did, not because you were his PA, but because you were obviously so innocent; even though he had caught you checking him out, he’s pretty sure that your mind didn’t extend to anything else. Unlike him.

 He sighed, knowing that he had to face you momentarily. Park Jimin – a married man – had been thinking of his assistant, who’s selflessly helping him by living in his house, while he masturbated. How fucked up is he? What kind of person –

 Stopping his self-derogatory monologue, he realised that he had nothing to be angry or ashamed about: he was no longer a married man, and as far as he knew, you were completely single. What was stopping him from advancing on you? It was almost as if a lightbulb had gone off in his brain. What was stopping him?

 With his mind made up, he decided to quickly slip on some clothes, probably needing to make a better impression than just a towel hanging loosely from his hips, then walked down the stairs to where you were making dinner.

 “Y/N?” He called, walking with purpose into the kitchen. His eyes fell to you chopping up some onions with Ezra quietly sketching something next to you. He suddenly felt awkward – the whole situation was too… Domestic for him. It was something that he never experienced.

 But it was too late for him to change his mind. Swallowing hard, he cleared his throat and directed his gaze to Ezra. “Go to your room. I need to talk to Y/N.”

 ***

 “Y/N?” Jimin called as he walked into the kitchen, seemingly angry. You immediately shrunk, thinking he was about to yell at you for waiting in his room. You felt nervousness fill your being at your pending doom. He turned his attention to Ezra, voice turning even harder. “Go to your room. I need to talk to Y/N.”

 That simple command, ‘Go to your room. I need to talk to Y/N’, was enough to bring back all your anger that consumed you earlier. Jimin needed to fix his relationship with Ezra, and he needed to fix it fast.

 Ezra wordlessly obeyed Jimin, hopping off the chair from next to you and making his way up to his room. Once he was safely back in his room you turned to Jimin, meeting his cold gaze, you refused to back down. Ezra needed you now.

 “Y/N, are you –”

 “Why do you speak to him like that, Jimin?” You coldly asked, trying to match his usual tone. “That’s what I needed to talk to you about earlier.” He didn’t reply to you, seemingly shocked in your tone and words. “I know it’s not my place to say anything, but it seems like no one else is willing to confront you about it. Ezra is just a child. It’s fine if you speak to me like that, I’m just your assistant, but he’s your child.”

 “You’re more than just –”

 “I wasn’t finished.” You said, visibly vibrating from fear, yet you still stood your ground. “You’re so cold towards him, Jimin. And why?”

 He stood frozen in place, unsure of what to say. In the many years he has known you, you’ve never seemed so… Angry about something. You were almost a completely different person and it made Jimin feel unsure about himself for the first time in forever. He swallowed hard and broke eye contact with you, deciding to instead stare at the floor.

 “I know that things must be hard because Irene isn’t here anymore, but you cannot allow that to effect Ezra.” You said softly, knowing that you had overstepped multiple boundaries. He opened his mouth to reply but found that he had no words to say. He had no excuse for his harshness towards Ezra.

 Before you could say anything else – perhaps an apology, perhaps more wakeup calls for him – he quickly walked out of the kitchen, probably going to hide in his bedroom. You sighed, knowing that you were too harsh, yet also knowing that it needed to be said.

 ***

 A few hours later, you still haven’t seen Jimin. He had been holed up in his room, doing God knows what, and didn’t even come out for dinner, which left you and Ezra to enjoy a quiet supper. But now it was late, and Ezra was currently knocked out in his room; apparently the shopping trip and then painting for hours was a little too much for his small body. The fact that he was sleeping was bad news for you – it left you to wallow in your thoughts, it left you to overthink.

 Sighing as you turned on the shower, you began stripping and jumped into the shower, enjoying the soothing feeling of hot water caressing your skin. However, your relief was short lived as unwelcome thoughts of Jimin swam through your mind. It wasn’t your place to say anything; all you did was hurt him when he needed someone to help him.

 ‘I should probably apologise’, you mused as you rinsed soap off of your body, feelings of guilt and shame pooling in the pit of your stomach. Nodding to yourself, you quickly wrapped yourself in a fluffy towel, before going back to your room, planning to quickly change into your pyjamas before going over to apologise to Jimin. Before you could do anything of the sort, you heard someone knock on your door, making you frown.

 “Ezra, is everything okay –?” You began, tightening the towel around you before pausing. It wasn’t Ezra, it was Jimin. He looked exhausted, worried even. Before you could say anything, he beat you to it.

 “I think I have feelings for you.” He blurted, causing you to look at him confused. You didn’t even get a word in before a look of realisation came over him and he all but bolted back to his room, leaving you with your mouth agape. What. The. Fuck.

 “J-Jimin!” You called, now worried for his sanity. You definitely shouldn’t have yelled at him earlier. He didn’t look back at you as he hurriedly closed his door. Exasperatedly, you walked down the hallway, and opened his door.

 He was laying on his bed, face buried into a pillow. If you weren’t so worried about him, you might have actually laughed at the situation. “Jimin?” You softly said, making him groan.

 “I’m sorry, Y/N. Just ignore whatever I said. Go back to your room.”

 “Why are you apologising?” You murmured, shutting the door and walking closer to him, ignoring what he said. He sighed into his pillow; face still buried there.

 “Please go. I can’t face you right now.”

 “I’m not going anywhere.” You said gently. “You need to learn how to express your feelings, Jimin. You can’t say something like that then run away.”

 “I didn’t run away.” He grumbled, barely lifting his face off of his pillow to eye you out. This was so unlike the usual Jimin that you couldn’t help but feel worried. “Go get dressed, Y/N.”

 “Then you’ll just lock your door so that I cannot get in.” You replied, suddenly acutely aware of your lack of clothing, making your cheeks heat with embarrassment. Clearing your throat, you tentatively walked forward, placing a hand on his muscular back. “Jimin? Please talk to me. I’m worried about you.”

 “I’m fine. Go to your room.”

 “Stop acting like a child.” You chastised, realizing that this was the only way to get him to talk to you. “You need to get used to talking about your feelings. Yours and Ezra’s relationship needs open communication –”

 “Y/N, I swear I’ll talk about my fucking feelings as soon as you get some clothes on.” He all but yelled, suddenly sitting up with his eyes running hungrily over your exposed legs. “I can’t tell you what I need to when my mind is set on tearing that God damn towel off.”

 You froze, completely shocked that he could ever say such a thing, let alone to you. Quickly shaking off your astonishment and arousal, you knew this was just a ploy to avoid talking about his feelings. Brushing your hand on his cheek, Jimin’s eyes fluttered shut while his chest rapidly rose and fell. Unbeknownst to you, he wasn’t using this as some tactic to get rid of you: he genuinely couldn’t get his mind off of your luscious thighs, wanting nothing more than to sink his teeth into it and mark you everywhere.

 “Please…” He whimpered, leaning into your touch despite wanting – no, needing – you to leave. He didn’t know if you were at all interested in him, but if by some off chance you were, he didn’t want this to be the first time anything like that happened.

 “Talk to me.” You whispered, worry and anxiousness blooming in your heart. What happened to the fearless, scary CEO? Where was he?

 Within a millisecond you felt his hands grip your towel-clad waist, flipping you underneath him, allowing his toned thighs to trap your own bare legs. Your heart began to pound rapidly, only adding to the growing heat between your thighs.

 “What do you want me to talk about?” He murmured as plump lips ghosting over your earlobe, resulting in a silent gasp to leave you. Why were his lips so soft? And why, oh God why, were you so responsive to his barest touch?

 Gulping, you tried to move, knowing that Jimin wasn’t in the right state of mind for this. Even so, it was almost as if your body didn’t want to believe that; your arousal from him doing basically nothing was slowly becoming evident.

 “Jimin, you’re not all there at the moment, we can talk about this in the morning –”

 “No, you wanted to talk, so let’s fucking talk.” He snapped, running his hands over your calves, head buried in the crook of your neck and his lips ghosting over your pulse point. “Now what do you want me to tell you, Y/N, hmm? Want me to tell you that I want to bury my face in-between your legs?”

 “Jimin!” You said, shocked at his lewd words. He didn’t even have the decency to look abashed, nor did he even pull away from your neck. Quietly kissing over your sensitive flesh, you began to feel goose bumps rise over your skin. He paid you no mind as his hands continued to roam over your exposed legs.

 “Do you want me to tell you that I want to have my lips wrapped around your pretty little clit? Or how about finger fucking you until you’re cumming all over my hands? Hmm? Is that what you want, baby?”

 As much as you wanted this, as much as you wanted him, you couldn’t allow him to do this. Not when he has such emotional issues. Tearing his lips away from your neck, you held his face securely between your hands.

 “You’re thinking with your dick.” You firmly said, not missing the way his eyes were clouded with lust. He shook his head, trying to move back to ghost lips over your soft skin. “I cannot let you do something you’ll regret. I came here to talk about your feelings. You need to communicate with me.”

 “Let me show you what I’m trying to say… You know I can’t… Use words for this.” He mumbled, feeling the foreign feeling of nervousness gnaw at him. “I’m not going to regret it, Y/N.”

 Without waiting for a response, he removed your hands from his cheeks and instead cupped your own. “Can I kiss you?”

 You were frozen, unable to think. Was this really happening? Did he really mean it?

 Before you could answer him, you felt his soft lips gently ghost over your own, allowing you plenty time to move away if you wanted, before urgently pressing his lips onto yours. He tasted like mint, the fresh feeling making you sigh into his mouth. The tip of his tongue ran over your bottom lip, silently asking you to let him in. Tentatively parting your lips, you felt his tongue slowly slip next to your own, the corners of his mouth slightly lifting upwards to create a small grin.

 ‘Is this what it is supposed to feel like?’ he mused, feeling butterflies erupt in the pit of his stomach. He never had this feeling of Irene; hell, they never kissed unless he was balls deep inside of her, and even then, affectionate kisses were few and far between. Kisses between them used to be a clash of teeth, sloppy, usually out of irritation and just to keep each other quiet because they had a child down the hallway, but this… This was different. This was right.

 Pushing his nervousness aside, he took one corner of your towel and slowly pushed it out of the way, giving you plenty time to stop him if you were uncomfortable. You didn’t stop him; you didn’t push him away – and why would you? You wanted him just as much (if not more) as he wanted you. Threading your fingers through his hair, you began kissing him harder, no longer fighting against your need for him. Even though you knew he wasn’t serious about his feelings for you, the sexual tension was too much for you to handle, especially since he looked so delectable hovering over your now naked body.

 “Knew you had fucking amazing tits.” He murmured to himself, breaking away from your lips to kiss down your neck and chest. Your towel lay underneath you, no longer a barrier between your bodies. He sucked hard on your chest, marking the flesh just above your nipple with a love bite, eliciting an audible gasp from you.

 Your arousal had begun to slowly drip out of you, the sticky fluid making your folds glisten, something that wasn’t missed by Jimin. After trailing down the length of your body, he placed a kiss over your mound, his eyes never leaving your own. With your heart beating profusely, you watched with bated breath as his eyes left yours to settle on your dripping folds.

 “You can stop me whenever you want.” He promised, struggling to contain his excitement at finally being able to taste you. Nodding at him, you watched as he spread your thighs, trailing his lips over the sensitive flesh, before abruptly sucking harshly on your inner thigh. He proceeded to do this to your other thigh as well, taking his time to get to where you needed him. After marking both your thighs, he soothingly ran his tongue over the bruised flesh, only adding to your frustration.

 “Jimin…” You quietly complained, your pussy throbbing from lack of attention. He looked up at you, laying his chin on your stomach, with a small smile on his features, making your heart stop. He was so gorgeous like this: carefree, happy.

 “I have to take my time.” He whispered sadly, his smile still on his face. “I don’t know if you’d want anything to do with me afterwards. You might leave.”

 “I’m not going anywhere.” You promised, heart wrenching at how lost he looked. Before any more words could be said, before any more reassuring sentiments could be uttered, Jimin peeled apart your folds, strands of sticky arousal visible connecting your lips. Whilst locking eyes with you, he repeatedly licked up your arousal, spreading your folds further to get him what he wants.

 His warm, soft tongue glided against your slickness, drawing soft sighs and moans out of you. Your fingers made their way into his hair, needing to feel him in some type of way as he so gently suckled on your dripping core. The pleasure engulfed your entire being, all curtesy of Jimin’s delicate mouth. Slowly, you felt him prod a finger at your honeyed entrance, resulting in a moan being drawn out of you.

 While he slowly worked his finger into your core, he leaned up and kissed you again, allowing you to taste yourself on his tongue. As you sucked on his bottom lip, making him chuckle at you, he inserted another finger into you, making you clench around his digits.

 “Shit, baby, you’re so tight.” He groaned, feeling you contract on his fingers. “When’s the last time anyone stretched you out?”

 “Jimin!” You moaned, feeling him massage that spongey flesh inside of you while his thumb rubbing loose circles over your slightly swollen clit.

 “As much as I want to hear your moans, I need you to be quiet, baby.” He murmured onto your lips as he continued his actions. You whimpered into his mouth, unable to contain yourself. “Think you can be quiet for me?”

 He didn’t wait for a reply; instead, he removed his hot mouth from your lips and placed it right on your clit, sucking harshly. Throwing your head back from the white-hot pleasure, you bit down your moans, wanting nothing more than to please him and be quiet.

 “Pussy taste so fucking good.” He praised whilst smirking, a result of you bucking your hips further into him while biting your lip, silently asking for more. Suddenly, he gripped your hips tightly and pressed the flat of his tongue over your leaking cunt, collecting your arousal on his taste buds before swallowing the nectar down, eventually abandoning the movements to stick his stiffened tongue in your entrance repeatedly. His tongue fucked you mercilessly, relentlessly, all the while rubbing forceful circles on your clit. Pressure continued to mount in your abdomen, only amplifying the extreme pleasure Jimin was inflicting on you.

 “J-Jimin… I’m going to…” You whimpered, your hands tangled in his hair as he suddenly added two fingers in you, using his mouth to suck on your clit harshly, almost painfully. He spread his fingers into a V, stretching your tight walls, kick starting your climax.

 Your body arched off the bed, pushing your exposed breasts into the cool air. Jimin worked you through your orgasm, his tongue and fingers not relenting as you continuously convulsed around him, your cum sliding down into his tongue. Your cunt throbbed, the pleasure foreign after not being stimulated for so long, yet he didn’t stop. Continuing his actions, he began to lick thick, bold stripes with his tongue, giving no sign of stopping, despite you ceaselessly pulling on his hair out of sheer overstimulation.

 “Jimin, Jimin, stop!” You whined, feeling the euphoric feeling evolve into something different. Because of your begs and pleas, his tongue relented; removing it from your pulsating clit to your lips. Tasting your cum on his tongue made you whimper, the mere thought of you tainting him was already turning you on again.

 His plump, pink lips never left your own, even when he switched from hovering over you to laying next to you, using his hands to continuously rub and knead your soft thighs.

 “You did so well for me, baby.” He praised, pulling you over his lap, making you straddle him. Subconsciously, you began to grind down onto him, feeling his hard cock through his pants. Letting out a strangled moan, he forcefully held your hips to prevent you from rubbing your slightly swollen, still glistening folds over his length. “We don’t have to go further, Y/n. Too much has been left unsaid. I just had to have a taste of you before you…”

 “You still haven’t told me if you meant what you said.” You whispered, not at all feeling awkward still being the only one who wasn’t fully clothed. “You need to get better with your emotions.”

 “I –” He choked out before looking away with tears in his eyes, causing your heart to clench. “How am I supposed to do this?”

 “Don’t cry, Jimin.” You whispered, using the pad of your thumb to gently wipe away the small tear that fell. “Just tell me how you feel. I won’t judge you. You’ve never judged me, right? You stood by me when no one else would. I’ll never forget how much you helped me, despite not even knowing me.”

 He slowly turned back to you, burying his face in the crook of your neck and holding you tightly. You felt silent sobs wreck through him, bringing forth tears to your own eyes; but you couldn’t cry, not when he needed someone, anyone, to be there for him. While allowing the sobs to die down and ignoring the sudden wetness on your neck, you stroked his hair soothingly, wondering when’s the last time anyone encouraged him to let out his emotions, encouraged him to cry. You didn’t rush him. You knew this was more than just him and you – it was Ezra, it was his lack of emotion and affection to everyone around him.

 “I’m ready to listen whenever you’re willing to talk, okay?” You whispered, softly kissing the top of his head. The action caused him to immediately tighten his arms around your waist, pulling you impossibly close. After a few moments, his croaky voice rang through the room.

 “I feel like the worst father in the world.” He admitted through his tears, small sniffles leaving him. “I know I should be doing better, but how? I don’t know my own son, Y/N. You’ve barely moved in and you know more about him than me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be affectionate.” He spat out the word, his tears drying on his cheeks.

 “You seemed to know how to be affectionate with me…” You said quietly, pointing out how he had become so caring when there was a sexual element. He sighed, running a hand through his messy hair.

 “That’s different.” He admitted. “I know what you like, I know how to make you cum, I know the right things to say... That’s just sex. It’s easy for me to do all those things, but anything other than that…”

 “Keep going, baby.” You encouraged, using a pet name to show him that you are listening.

 “I’m confident enough in my body, but I’m not confident with my words.” He carefully explained, voice cracking slightly. Taking a shaky breath, he finally looked up into your eyes, finding comfort in them despite being scared, terrified even, of opening up like this. “I really like you, Y/N – oh my God, I sound like some teenager –”

 Quickly pecking him on his lips, he fell quiet, mesmerized by the softness of your lips, if only for a second. “I like it when you sound like a teenager.” You replied, no teasing tilt to your voice as you looked at him with adoration.

 “I can’t love you like anyone else can.” He admitted, still gazing into your eyes, seemingly unable to look away. “I don’t know how to, evidently because I’m already fucking divorced. But I can try. I can learn. You can teach me.” He breathed, saying everything rather quickly. “Please teach me. I can’t let you go. I need you. Ezra needs you.”

 “Jimin,” You said carefully, trying not to sound too harsh. “I’m your assistant.”

 “I don’t care.” He breathed, heart pounding through his chest. “You can move to another department if you want, but I need you in my life.”

 “What if it doesn’t work out?” You whispered, having to think all the consequences through for the both of you. He frowned at the thought of not being able to work out your relationship.

 “Then at least we tried.” He whispered back, his forehead leaning on your own. “But please give this a chance. I need you. I need this. Teach me how to love again.”

 ***

 One year later

 “Dad, I’m going to be late!” Ezra huffed, trying to move away from the hugs and kisses his father was trying to give him. Jimin elected to ignore him, kissing his forehead one more time, before Ezra ran to you, hiding behind you. “Y/N, please make him stop! Grandma’s waiting for me.”

 “Why would I stop him when I want to do the same thing?” You laughed, picking him up and peppering his face with kisses. Jimin chuckled, gathering Ezra’s backpack, various toys and paint supplies, packing them neatly. Jimin’s mother had asked Ezra to accompany her for a short holiday to the countryside, which Ezra basically jumped at.

 “Mommy, please!” He whined, making you freeze. He had never called you that, and by the silence echoing throughout the room, Jimin hadn’t expected it either. Before you could break the silence, Ezra gasped and ran over to his Grandmother, who had just walked through the open front door, hugging her tightly in greeting.

 “I’m sorry for rushing you, but we really do need to get on the road.” She apologised, all of you standing outside as Jimin placed Ezra’s luggage in the trunk of his mother’s car.

 A few minutes later, you and Jimin were waving goodbye to a retreating car. After seeing them safely off, Jimin snatched up your hand, intertwining your fingers and bringing it up to his lips. He still had an irrational fear of showing affection to you and Ezra when people were around, but when you were in your safe haven, he was the most affectionate person you’ve ever met.

 “Mommy, huh?” He asked while smirking, using his free hand to bring your hips to his body. You smiled and blushed in response, shrugging as if it was nothing, but inside you were jumping for joy. He planted a kiss on your lips before leading you back inside, his hands squeezing your ass gently. “So, mommy and daddy are having some alone time this weekend…”

 “Ezra didn’t call you daddy.” You laughed, walking into the kitchen to get a snack to eat.

 “Yeah, but you did.” He replied, biting his lip as you gasped, feeling heat rise to your cheeks as he brought up your hidden kink that you had accidentally let slip a few nights ago. He hadn’t brought it up until now, making you think that he hadn’t heard your whines as he had been too busy fucking you senseless.

 “Park Jimin!” You chastised, swallowing hard as your hands barely grasped the ice cream pint you had gotten from the freezer. He raised an eyebrow at you, squaring his shoulders. “I didn’t think you heard me.” You admitted, blushing tomato red.

 “Oh, don’t worry, I heard you loud and clear, baby girl.” He promised, pressing his bulge against you as you leaned on the large island in the middle of kitchen. His hands found purchase in your hair, roughly yanking it backwards so that your neck was exposed. He ran his lips all over your neck, biting the flesh, leaving dark red marks.

 “Ezra is barely out the door and you’re already this horny?” You snarked, trying to hide your gasps as he sucked rather harshly on your pulse point.

 “We haven’t been able to really fuck lately.” He shrugged, lifting you up on the cold granite surface and wrapping your legs around him. “Quickies aren’t as fun as being buried in this pussy for hours and hours on end, baby.”

 “We have to go through that presentation – Jimin!”

 “Where are your panties, huh?” He teased, his hand slipping under the hem of your skirt to knead your bare ass. “You’re acting like you don’t want my cock, but you aren’t even wearing anything to cover this pretty, little pussy.”

 You didn’t reply, knowing that if you did a whimper would slip out of you, only adding to Jimin’s smugness. He ran his fingers along your folds, revelling in the way thick strands of your arousal clung to his fingers, essentially coating them in your arousal. You couldn’t take it anymore, the charade of not wanting him, so you threaded your fingers through his hair, using it to bring him to your mouth.

 “Jimin, please…” You breathed, feeling his fingers dance around your clit. As you spoke, he froze, pulling away from your lips with his eyebrow raised.

 “What did you just call me?” He asked sternly, his fingers retreating from your wet cunt, only to come down hard on your clit, the slapping sound echoing throughout the kitchen. “You need to be more respectful, you little brat.”

 “Daddy…” You corrected, voice still barely above a whisper. “Daddy, please.”

 He slapped your pussy again, ensuring that whimpers left your lips. Your arousal coated his fingers, the sticky substance making his skin glint in the light.

 “Look at what a mess you’ve made, baby girl.” Jimin murmured, inspecting his shining fingers before looking you right in the eye and slipping one in his mouth. The sight alone was enough to release another gush of arousal out of you, some of your juices now coating your thighs. “Fuck, you taste good.” He groaned, sucking on his finger. He glanced up at you, his eyes showing just how smug he is. “Want to have a taste?”

 Without waiting for a reply, he placed his fingers in your mouth, allowing you to taste yourself as you sucked his fingers clean. Maintaining eye contact with him, you swirled your tongue around his digits, licking him clean.

 “Like that?” He asked, eyes dark with need. With his finger still in your mouth, you nodded, looking up at him through your eyelashes. “What do you want now, baby?”

 “Daddy’s cock.” You instantaneously replied, almost quivering with need. He smirked, allowing you to grind into his bulge, trying to desperately get any source of friction.

 “And what do you want to do with Daddy’s cock?”

 “Suck it.” You answered, mouth salivating at the mere thought of it. “I want to suck it and taste Daddy’s cum.”

 “Then why aren’t you on your knees?”

 Wordlessly, you hopped off of the counter, knees harshly hitting the floor, yet you couldn’t care less. Your hands messily unbuckled Jimin’s belt, precariously shoving his jeans and boxers down his muscular thighs before you began to palm him in your hand.

 “Don’t fucking tease me.” He groaned, voice deep and laced with seduction. “I still have half a mind of punishing you for being disrespectful, baby.”

 Not wanting to get punished – well, at least for now – you slipped him into your mouth, sucking gently on his tip while maintaining eye contact. You gave it a few kitten licks, sucking off his precum, you run the flat of your tongue on the underside of his cock, making him grip your hair. His eyes hardened as he knew you were still teasing him, so he used his grip on your hair to push you all the way down to the hilt, making you take every inch of his cock down your throat.

 “Ah, fuck yeah, baby.” He moaned, feeling your throat muscles expand and contract as it tried to swallow all of him. Tears sprung to your eyes, the lack of oxygen evident, but it only made Jimin chuckle. “Who fucking told you to tease me, huh? You wanted my cock in your mouth, baby. Now take. It. All.”

 He punctuated every word with a thrust, increasing the tears in your eyes as well as the spit leaking out the side of your mouth. You loved it when Jimin made you take all of him, and it was evident as your arousal had slickened your thighs even more. He eventually took pity on you, pulling you off his dick as you gasped for air, your tears now streaming in rivulets down your face.

 Allowing your lungs the chance to get air, you begun using your hands to jack him off, your spittle and his precum acting as lubricant. You stared up at him as his face relaxed with pleasure, head thrown back as your hands continuously pumped his length. Eventually, when your lungs had recovered, you put him back into your mouth, bobbing your head on the parts that you could reach without choking. With your hands fondling his balls, and your hollowed-out cheeks repeatedly sucking on him, he quickly met his end.

Grabbing your hair, he once again pushed you right up against his pubic bone and shot his cum right down your throat. High pitched, melodious moans reached your ears as his orgasm hit him. The salty, tangy taste of his cum coated your taste buds, the taste alone making you clench your thighs.

 After the rush of his climax was over, you came off his dick with a ‘pop’, nuzzling your head into his thigh, clearly looking for praise. With his chest still heaving, he looked down at you, affection blooming in his eyes.

 “You always suck Daddy’s cock so well, baby.” He murmured, helping you to your feet, bringing your lips to his own. “Such a good girl, hmm? Does my baby want a reward?”

 “Swallowing your cum was my reward.” You breathed, still revelling in the feeling of having him fall apart in your mouth. He smirked, enjoying how submissive and God damn fuckable you were. His hand slipped around your throat, squeezing the sides gently, while his lips ghosted over the shell of your ear.

 “Run up to our room. By the time I get there, I want you to be naked and laying on the bed for Daddy. Got it?”

 Nodding, you felt excitement bloom deep in your chest, knowing that you were truly about to be rewarded. Once he let go of your throat, you all but ran up the stairs, wanting nothing more than to please Jimin. You stripped out of your skirt and stockings before you even made it to the bed, throwing them haphazardly over your shoulder, then you began to unbutton your blouse, peeling off your bra in the process.

 Waiting with bated breath, you found yourself squirming with impatience on the cool, silky sheets. Right before you could huff out with irritation, Jimin made his appearance in all his glory. His own shirt was nowhere to be found, and his jeans hung low on his hips, giving you quite a view of his abs and defined v-line.

 He paid you no mind, walking over to the closet to rummage around in the drawers. He came back a few moments later with a pair of handcuffs and nipple clamps, as well as something shoved in his back pocket. You quivered at the thought of him tying you up; despite the amount of times it had happened, it still brought an insane amount of adrenaline to your bloodstream.

 “Good girl…” He trailed off as he took in your naked body, feeling his cock stir again. The silence in the room faded as he slipped the cuffs around your wrists, then fastened it to the headboard so that your arms were stretched above you, pushing your breasts up into the air. Using this to his advantage, he immediately snapped the clamps onto your nipples, the soft silicone doing little to soften the blow of the pinch.

 A hiss left your lips when he tugged on the chain, accentuating the pain that claimed your nipples. He tugged on it again, gauging your reaction, and smirking when you whimpered.

 “Does it hurt, baby?” He asked as he kissed your neck, sucking red blotches onto your skin. You nodded in response, causing him to smirk even further. “But you like it, don’t you? Daddy’s baby girl enjoys the pain.”

 Before you could respond to him, his lips claimed yours, quickly claiming every breath you had. After a year of being together, Jimin’s lips knew exactly how to move with your own, not to fast nor to slow. His tongue swiped your bottom lip, slowly snaking its way to your own, where it massaged it gently.

 In the midst of his lips ravishing your own, his hand slipped into his back pocket, retrieving a clit massager. Without breaking the kiss, he slipped his hand in-between your legs, prying them apart so that he could place the toy right above your clit.

 As soon as he turned on the toy, the gentle sucking caused you to moan into his mouth. Continuing to move his tongue in tandem with yours, Jimin slowly began to circle the head of your toy around your clit, getting maddeningly close to the bundle of nerves but never actually touching it.

 “Daddy…” You whined, wiggling your hips so that he could place the toy directly on your clit. “Stop teasing!”

 “Weren’t you just teasing me when we were in the kitchen?” He cockily asked, once again circling your clit with the toy. “Remember, baby? When you weren’t giving me what I wanted?”

 “But you came!” Your argued, voice slowly becoming whinier as your stomach began to clench uncomfortably in anticipation. “I want to cum too, Daddy. Please!”

 “You want to come?” Jimin asked, amused at the way your hips were trying to angle themselves to get the stimulation directly on your clit. You nodded, arms straining against the handcuffs. “Why don’t you stop chasing the toy then, huh? Why don’t you be a good girl for Daddy?”

 “I am a good girl – ah!”

 Your sentence was cut short by Jimin placing the toy right on your clit, turning the toy to its highest setting. A plethora of moans left your lips as the suction steadily grew and grew, simulating someone sucking on your clit.

 “Daddy…” You moaned weakly, the pleasure making your brain fuzzy. With the suction directly on your clit, your orgasm loomed over you, driving any other thought out of your head. Needing something to set you off, you began to buck your hips into the toy, moaning and whimpering softly. “Please let me cum, Daddy… Please…”

 “You can, baby.” He cooed into your ear, mesmerized with the way your body was lifting off of the bed to claim your orgasm. He quickly tugged on the nipple clamps, knowing that a tiny bit of pain would increase your pleasure tenfold. “Such a good little girl for Daddy, yeah? Always to ready to beg.”

 With a yelp, your climax washed over you, turning your bones to nothing and transporting your head to cloud nine. You trembled lightly on the bed, sending a rush of blood back to Jimin’s cock and making him impossibly hard. He watched with bated breath as your chest rose and fell rapidly, the nipple clamps jingling with your actions, a visual indicator of the amount of pleasure your body was facing. Once your orgasm receded, he quickly turned off the toy and replaced it with his mouth, swallowing your cum and treating it almost with reverence.

 “Daddy.” You croaked, voice almost gone due to the number of moans and whines that had left your throat just a few moments ago. Even though you had just experienced one of the best orgasms of your life, you wanted more – you wanted him. “Want you.”

 “Are you sure you can handle another one, Y/N?” He asked seriously, not wanting to push you further than you could physically go. You nodded excitedly, pulling on the handcuffs to show how ready you were. He chuckled at your eagerness, taking off the clamps off of your nipples. They were puffy and sore, but your breasts welcomed the blood flow.

 “Please fuck me.” You whispered, your cunt already clenching at the thought of being filled by Jimin’s cock. He smiled at you, his beauty taking your breath away as he stripped out of his jeans and boxers. His cock was already rock hard as it leaked pre-cum, the substance beading at the tip of his dusky pink head.

 “Want my cock, baby?” He asked, positioning himself in-between your legs. You tried to reach out to him, wanting to align his dick at your entrance and watch how he pushed into your core, but the restraints that bound your wrists prevented that. That didn’t stop you from continuously tugging on the cuffs, the metal rattling against the bed post. “Keep acting like a little brat and I’ll leave you here the entire day.”

 His threat immediately caused you to cease your actions, wanting nothing more than to feel him in you. Hearing the absence of you pulling on the restraints made him smirk up at you, knowing that you would probably do anything to have him in your cunt right now.

 “So obedient.” He mused, leaning back and stroking his length to rile you up. “My baby will do anything for my cock, hmm? Such a dirty fucking slut for my cock.”

 “Only for you, Daddy.” You promised, your breathing erratic due to seeing Jimin’s hand enclosed over his dick, lazily fisting the length. “Please fuck me. I need your cock in me.” He raised an eyebrow at you, still wanting to tease you despite being painfully hard. Your pussy clenched when he threw his head back in pleasure, fist pumping up and down his cock. “Jimin, please!”

 “Is that how you talk to me?” He snapped, sliding his length into you as his hand tightened around your neck. Without giving you time to adjust to suddenly having his entire cock in you, he began to piston out of you, the sound of skin on skin echoing throughout the room. Your eyes rolled back from the pleasure, the feeling of having his cock force open your walls and the feeling of his hand tightening around your neck making you lose all train of thought. “Answer me, you fucking brat!”

 “Daddy!” You corrected; voice hoarse from being choked. His hand left your neck, instead using his hands to hold your hips at an angle so that he could go deeper. “I – I’m sorry, Daddy!”

 Hot tears of pleasure ran down your face, the droplets falling to your chest. “You’re crying?” He scoffed, somehow making his hips rut into you faster, your tits moving from each powerful thrust. “Is my cock too much for you to handle?” He asked, thumbing your clit, bringing more tears of pleasure to your face. You shook your head at his question, showing him just how well you could take his dick. “Hmm, good girl. Such a good slut for my cock, huh? Take it all, baby. Take every fucking inch of me in this tight pussy.”

 “Going to… Gonna cum.” You whimpered, feeling your pleasure reaching a precipice quickly. He groaned as he felt your walls hug his length even tighter due to your impending orgasm. His thumb continued to work quick, tight circles over your clit, the white-hot pleasure surging through your veins and setting off your climax. “Daddy!”

 “Ah, fuck, Y/N!” Jimin moaned, your convulsing cunt bringing about his own orgasm. Your body arched off of the bed once again, your orgasm seemingly too intense for your body to handle. Your thighs trembled and a heat rushed up to your cheeks, sweat gleaming on your body. Jimin’s cock was coated in your cum, the sheer feeling of it causing him to shoot his hot cum deep in you. High pitched curses and moans left his plump lips, ropes of his cum coating your walls as both of you tried to control your heavy breathing.

 Without pulling out of you, Jimin reached up and unlocked the handcuffs, throwing them onto the floor to join your long-forgotten clothes. Flipping you over so that you were laying on him, he kissed your raw wrists gently, despite both of your chests still heaving.

 “Thank you, baby.” He murmured, kissing your forehead. “I’m sorry if I was too rough.”

 “You were amazing, Jimin.” You said softly, enjoying the feeling of having his skin directly on your own. “I wouldn’t want this with anyone other than you.”

 “I love you.” He blurted, unable to contain his feelings any longer. You sucked in a breath, not believing your own ears. It was the first time he had ever said something like this. “I know it’s been a journey and a half with me, teaching me how not to be some cold asshole, but God damn, I love you, Y/N. I can’t imagine a life without you; I don’t want to imagine a live without you.”

 “I love you too, Jimin.” You replied, a smile creeping on your face as your heart fluttered. “I love you more than you will ever know.”

 ***

 ↳ a/n: so that was the first instalment of my colour series! I plan on doing a one shot for each member based on meanings of a specific colour. Please let me know what you think and let me know if you want to be tagged in the future one shots :)

[gofancyninjaworld]

The World of Heroes, Part 3:  The Association

With great thanks to @scumerage for giving me the necessary framing. 

So, welcome to Part 3 of me geeking way too much about heroes and One Punch Man. In Part 1, I talked about the challenge of being a hero.   In Part 2, I took a step backwards and looked at what heroes were in the context of OPM.  This part,  I’m going to build on them and write about the world of the pro-hero. 

No one has ever needed especial qualifications to be a hero, neither in the real world nor in that of OPM.  Heroes arise from anywhere depending on the situation.  The idea of someone paid to be a hero seems rather weird the more you think about it. 

A: Why a Hero Association?

We can’t understand the Hero Association unless we take the time to really appreciate why it came to exist.  The Hero Association was born out of desperation.  Specifically,  mysterious beings had been appearing with increasing frequency in the world going back at least twenty years -- and back when Saitama was in middle school, it’d already gotten severe enough a problem that there were calls for the government to set up a specialist force to deal with the problem. 

Calls that went unheeded. 

For years. 

Until Agoni had that epiphany that his grandson having the luck of being saved by a random stranger didn’t have to be luck. So he got the buy in of both politicians and business people and set up a Hero Association to organise heroes and save people (not necessarily the same thing). The Hero Association is 100% donation funded, no taxes.

Like a beacon of hope rising out of a sea of tragedy, the Hero Association’s main building stands.

B: Why be a Pro-Hero?

The key thing that I’m going to bold is that the Hero Association ORGANISES heroes.  It does not train them, taking only ‘battle ready’ people.  It does not worry about developing them.  You have to already be a hero. Wannabes need not apply.  

This fact has many important implications. 

First, there is a right time to join the Hero Association: when the hero work you are already doing has come to take up so much of your time that it is interfering with  your ability to make a living.  The undying gratitude of the person you saved may be priceless, but it doesn’t pay the rent, nor the hospital bills you incurred.  Come to the Hero Association at that time and it’s a fantastic deal.  It will reliably pay you every month. It will pay your medical bills. It will record and recognise your activities. It will indemnify you against the damage that you do during the course of your work. If you’re not in Class C, it will help you with equipment.  It may even put money aside for the pension you’ll need much sooner than you think.  

Second, the Hero Association may not train, but it also does not constrain.  As discussed in earlier parts, the sort of person who becomes a hero is someone who doesn’t fear standing out or going against the flow -- they’re independent minded and often more than a little eccentric.  The HA’s attitude allows for the weird and wonderful heroes we see to thrive. No prescription of how to do your heroism.  No uniforms. Out of Class C, no expectations of minimum activity.  

However, while the Hero Association has broad standards, those standards are NOT LOW.  Every profession that carries authority over others from teaching to the police has a perennial problem of how to spot and weed out those attracted to it for power tripping purposes, the narcissists, the sociopaths, the sadists, the abusers, and the plain evil.  The Hero Association’s pro-heroes are remarkably good -- far better than the general population.  There’s a certain amount of nonsense the HA will put up with from super-useful heroes but we’re seeing that even there, they have limits.  I don’t know what combination of selection criteria and the demands of the job that create this, but it works.   

And there’s a logic to it: hero work, doing good hero work consistently is far too tough for people who don’t have both a serious moral core and a desire to be pro-social to last.  The manga expansion has been at great pains to examine the different avenues available to people with the power to be pro-heroes but not the moral core and/or social drive -- regular law-abiding civilians doing whatever the hell they want to.  Sportspeople. Criminals. Mercenaries. Vigilantes.  Conversely, we’ve also been shown at least one person with the morals, but not the strength -- that person made an exceptional police officer. 

With great power comes no obligation -- your life is your own

It’s not a perfect model, and its shortcomings are becoming clearer -- which I’ll discuss in a bit -- but it does do its job of supporting exceptional and highly individual heroes to dedicate themselves fully to their self-appointed work. And they’re good at drawing from society at large: a non comprehensive list of former (and current) professions of pro-heroes includes actor, circus performer, construction worker, salaryman, manager, swordsmen, professional martial artists, hunter, trapper, perfumier, farmer, athletes, body builders, ninjas, ballerinas...the list goes on.

C. Classes and Ranks

Deploying heroes means sorting heroes so as to use them in the best way possible.  There are no size limits to any of the classes -- as many as fit the requirements of a class will be in it.  The HA is always recruiting.

Class C is the threshing floor, where heroes start if there’s no compelling reason to recommend that they start elsewhere -- or if they have their doubts.  The combination of low pay and the expectation of weekly results means that there’s no opportunity to work half-heartedly. It quickly discourages the lazy, those who aren’t strongly self-motivated, those lacking in initiative, those expecting quick recognition, the ones who simply cannot work with others, the ones who won’t take lawful orders and the plain incompetent. Expectations are relatively low. Stopping small time criminals, being helpful to people and being willing/able to work with others to take care of monsters will see you in good standing. Getting out of Class C seems to be dependent on showing that you can be relied on to single-handedly kill monsters (any damn kind) OR by being promoted to C Class Rank 1.  The majority of heroes have done at least a short stint in Class C, including many current Class S heroes. 

It’s hard to survive on your own in Class C

If a hero is inclined to be lazy, Class B is where to be.  No formal quota, no formal  expectation of being drafted to help with an escalating situation (like Class A and S heroes), semi-decent pay,  help with equipment design/maintenance,  its lower reaches are quite a safe place to coast.  When a Class B hero does work, the expectation on them is that they be entrusted to handle a wolf-level threat on their own and if Don Pacino is typical of the sort of criminal that gets a B Class bounty, heavily-armed gangs are fair game.  The challenge of Class B is the Blizzard Group -- if you work close to or in Z-City, and are ambitious, Fubuki will come knocking sooner or later.  It's a problem that the Hero Association knows about and chooses to do nothing about, seeing it as just another test ambitious heroes have to negotiate.

It’s a shame that Class B is so dominated by the Blizzard Group that it’s difficult to find pictures of just Class B heroes that’s not them. And yet we know nearly none of them...

Class A is the where the main backbone of the Hero Association lies.  That this is shifting of late doesn’t negate the fact that most monsters are threat level tiger or below.  For the vast majority of threats, Class A is where the buck stops. The roughly forty members of this class are the highest class of heroes you could still consider ‘normal’ human beings.  Highly visible, hard-working and with high expectations placed on them, A-Class heroes are what other heroes aspire to be.  There may be no formal tutelage system in the Hero Association, but Class A heroes take turns to orient new recruits as to the rules and expectations of being a pro-hero.

Class A comes across as a group whose members are just as comfortable on their own as in working with others.

Class S is... well, it is special.  Unlike the other classes, a hero cannot be promoted to Class S: it is by direct invitation only.  And that invitation is on battle record, battle record, and battle record alone.  Only the demonstrated ability to single-handedly slay a threat-level demon monster or more will elicit that invitation.  By staying at Class A Rank 1, Amai Mask closes off the possibility that a hero who doesn’t meet those requirements can nevertheless request a promotion interview and talk or network their way in.  Why so persnickety?  Because these heroes are the In Case of Emergency heroes: when the shit really hits the fan, that’s when they step up.  With so few of them, a single S-Class hero can easily be all that stands between tens of thousands of people and a horrible death with no back up available for hours.  We’ve seen a lot more of them than the average person in the story does because the story is set precisely in the midst of several extreme emergencies. 

They may be the most powerful heroes, but they don’t have the best reputation amongst other heroes. Even between themselves -- they’re amazingly fractious and Flashy Flash’s summation of his colleagues is particularly scathing: 

The other Class S heroes are useless.  They’re either stubborn or hide their own identity, weirdos, children and old people.  (from webcomic chapter 112)

Getting this many Class S heroes in the same place at the same time is like pulling teeth

What about ranks?  Within classes heroes have ranks, but they don’t directly correspond to battle power, have little to do with seniority, and are absolutely not measures of hierarchy within a class. What they are are measures of a given hero’s perceived utility to the Hero Association. Ranks give heroes something to measure themselves by, act as a tangible measure of progress, are something that does correlate to how well a hero gets paid within the class and of course, they bring feel superior points.  If a hero is minded to climb classes, Rank 1 of the class below is the ticket to apply for promotion. 

What’s very fair about the ranking system is that it’s assessed weekly. No matter where a hero starts out, week by week, they cannot help but build an actual track record. The Hero Association isn’t slow to reward good heroes with promotions -- it’s why even the Saitama who won’t report his work and claims to cheat is rising so fast that other heroes keep attacking him.   What’s troublesome about it is that it’s a points based system, whereby points can be divided between heroes... which opens the door to some underhanded shenanigans. 

Wrapping up

The Hero Association has solved a very troublesome problem: how to reliably hire a hero?  Precisely because anyone can be moved to acts of heroism, people have been saved by a random assemblage of other people, only a few of whom would ever think of doing it regularly.   What they have done in short is to give those people basic security and protection and otherwise let them get on with doing what they do.  

What’s been good about their approach is that they’ve effectively captured lightning in a bottle, bringing together some exceptional people, and deploying them in a way that balanced their needs for individuality with the benefit of collective action.   Until recently, it’s a model that has worked.  What’s been bad about it…. Ah, that will wait until the last part of this series.

[cassh24sg]

As some states clamp down, Rhode Island still embraces payday lending with the equivalent of a triple-digit interest rate

During a recent event at Tolman High School in Pawtucket, educators and Democratic leaders celebrated a new law requiring Rhode Island students to be trained in financial literacy.

Rhode Island Treasurer General Seth Magaziner said the research is clear – students become more tax conscious adults as they learn the fundamentals of finance.

“When students have access to education, how to budget, how to save, how to invest, these children, on average, have higher creditworthiness, lower debt, and less chance of ever taking out a payday loan. and all sorts of other better financial results, ”he said. “So that works.”

Despite this financial literacy campaign, Rhode Island is the only state in New England that allows consumers to fall into what the Center for Responsible Lending calls the “Payday Loan Debt Trap”. In other words, while the interest rate is capped at 21 percent for most commercial lenders, payday lenders can charge an annual percentage of 260 percent.

Maine allows the equivalent of 217 percent APR, according to the center, while strong safeguards restrict payday loans in other New England and northeastern states.

In Rhode Island, payday lenders charge $ 10 interest on every $ 100 borrowed, up to $ 450 on a single loan, for a period of two weeks.

Andy Posner, founder and CEO of Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit credit agency based in Providence, said that’s why payday loans can seem reasonable.

For example, someone who takes out a $ 300 loan should pay back $ 330 within two weeks. However, Posner said that most payday customers fail to meet this deadline. Instead, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they repeatedly extend the loan and pile up more debts.

“So a $ 300 loan ends up costing $ 700 in interest and fees,” Posner said. In other words, the basic problem here is that a payday lender only makes money when you are trapped in debt. If you use the product successfully as planned, you will lose money. “

Rhode Island lawyers have been fighting to cap these rates since 2011.

And when the Student Financial Education Bill was introduced in the House of Representatives in April, the sponsor in that chamber, Rep. Joseph McNamara (D-Warwick), leader of the RI Democratic Party, cited payday lenders as the reason behind the legislation was necessary. “In my district alone,” he said, “if you drive down Warwick Avenue from Cranston before you go a mile and a half into it, you will see two payday loan franchises, national payday loan companies that charge exorbitant rates and benefit from our citizens. “

But unlike some other states, Ocean State legislatures have shown little interest in cracking down on the payday loan industry.

State Senate President Dominick Ruggerio was among the elected officials at the financial literacy event earlier this month at Tolman High School in Pawtucket, a city where payday loan giant Advance America has three locations. Ruggerio said a bill to cap interest on payday loans to 36 percent was not a priority in the final weeks of the legislature.

“Haven’t even looked at them,” said Ruggerio. “I didn’t know there was a bill.”

“It’s been in the legislature for 10 years,” one reporter said.

“I don’t know at this point,” said Ruggerio. “It doesn’t sound like something we’re going to do in this legislature.”

House Speaker Joe Shekarchi is more cautious. During a recent interview, he was noncommittal as to whether he will have the payday loan bill voted in the House of Representatives, despite saying he believes payday is a predatory practice.

“I hear this argument,” said Shekarchi. “I tend to agree with that argument. It’s not something I do or recommend. But there are other people in Rhode Island who have a different view that it’s a private business and people should have that service available. “

Governor Dan McKee does not appear to have publicly raised concerns about payday loans in Rhode Island.

When asked for comment, McKee spokeswoman Alana O’Hare said the governor and his team will review payday loan capping legislation on their way through the general assembly. The governor supports efforts to protect consumers from harmful debt cycles and to protect Rhode Islanders and their personal finances. “

The ostensible status quo of payday loans comes from the fact that lawmakers passed laws to promote student financial literacy and a bill requiring financial institutions to report suspected financial exploitation of seniors to the state’s Healthy Aging Office and to temporarily suspend such transactions.

The Rhode Island legislature legalized payday loans 20 years ago.

Julie Townsend, senior policy counsel for the parent company of Advance America, the nation’s largest payday lender – with 18 locations across the state – said consumers understand their finances.

She said consumers typically use payday loans to fill a void when they are short of cash.

“Our customers understand their finances,” said Townsend, “and they use this product because it’s the cheapest loan they can get. It’s cheaper than the other options they face such as overdraft fees, undeliverable check fees, and late payment penalties. “

Some payday customers describe the situation differently.

Vannessa Ramirez, now 29, took out a payday loan when she moved to a new apartment in Providence two years ago and couldn’t afford to turn on the utilities. She said payday loans are being marketed as a quick and easy way to resolve financial difficulties.

“What happens in the end is that most people don’t understand how the interest and fees are going to affect you,” Ramirez said. “In a moment of desperation you think, ok, I have to do this. In my situation, I couldn’t be in a house without electricity and gas so I did this to solve that, but then I wouldn’t have enough money to pay my rent or buy food so it just did a lot more heavy.”

Ramirez took advantage of payday despite working for the Capital Good Fund despite being unaware of the risks.

The nonprofit started a social entrepreneurship course at Brown University in 2008 and describes its mission as helping people get out of poverty. Ramirez says she eventually paid off her payday loan by refinancing it through the Capital Good Fund at a dramatically lower interest rate.

Andy Posner of the Capital Good Fund said it was hard to talk about lower-cost loan programs like CGF and credit unions as the payday loan industry can spend a lot more money on advertising. “There is a little bit of a level playing field,” he said.

Still, the industry faces a number of challenges.

The advent of online lending has impacted the business of payday lenders using brick and mortar stores. Rhode Island had a little less than $ 50 million in loans last year, up from a high of nearly $ 100 million in 2014. That doesn’t include interest and fees.

Online loans are legal in Rhode Island as long as the lender is licensed. The state does not differentiate between online and brick-and-mortar payday lenders. It also groups the licenses issued to these lenders with check cashing offices.

Both payday supporters and critics say that federal stimulus payments last year reduced demand for payday loans. Even so, the industry is still considered highly profitable when lenders can charge tariffs like those in Rhode Island.

If proponents here want to see how a state can change course, they can look to Illinois and Hawaii, which enacted laws this year to impose a 36 percent interest rate cap on payday lenders. Almost 20 states use a similar limit.

Brent Adams of the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute said it took 20 years to get to that point and that the increased focus on racial justice gave a boost after the death of George Floyd.

Adams said the protracted battle shows a gap between how voters and elected officials view the payday industry.

“When consumers of all political parties are asked whether they want interest rate caps, such as B. support an interest rate cap of 36 percent, with large bipartisan majorities, they say ‘yes’. “he said.” But that is not reflected in the state capitals and in the state capital because the industry is very powerful. They have a lot of connections, they have a lot of lobbyists, they have a lot of resources. “

In Rhode Island, Advance America pays former House Speaker William Murphy $ 30,000 annually to advocate his interests. He’s one of the most prominent lobbyists in the state, though Advance America’s Julie Townsend claims Murphy is no more influential than a typical lobbyist.

On the other hand, state treasurer Seth Magaziner and a small number of liberal lawmakers and activists are loudly calling for changes to payday lending. They appear every year and testify at legislative hearings. Posner paid for a full-page ad in The Providence Journal last week – with this headline in large print: RI Legislature: Okay with 260% APR? “- in a final attempt to motivate lawmakers during what will likely be the final week of the General Assembly.

But the legislature leaders do not seem to be pushing the bill to cap payday interest rates to the bottom of their respective chambers. And proponents didn’t organize a broad grassroots campaign urging reluctant lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013 and a state right to abortion in 2019.

This is an expanded version of a story that aired on The Public’s Radio.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ripr.org. Follow him on Twitter @IanDon. Sign up for his weekly RI Politics and Media newsletter here.

source https://www.cassh24sg.com/2021/06/28/as-some-states-clamp-down-rhode-island-still-embraces-payday-lending-with-the-equivalent-of-a-triple-digit-interest-rate/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

AND IN FACT, WHEN WE TOOK USERS ONTO OUR SERVER

That's more ideal than typical. Before central governments were powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. The thing about ideas, and that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you might as well not exist.1 FREE 0. But there is nothing the rich like more than convenience. No one knows whether a startup would usually become profitable only after raising and spending quite a lot in common with us. 25 to 40% of the company.2 Or rather, IPO then bust, or just a niche product company, but to fail to mention a few critical technical secrets.

Compared to other industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. The need has to give. So if you want to raise.3 There are a lot of people realize this, even in an industry as conservative as venture capital.4 I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Architecture is related to physics, in the sense of having a lot of cultural baggage, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. The first, obviously, is that you may not even be meaningful to say that VCs are clueless?

When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time and attention as the successes. When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your own.5 They have to, or die. We take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all.6 You may be thinking, how hard can it be?7 Morally, they care more about what they find valuable as well what they're willing to be held to a standard that, say, Python? 08221981 supported 0. But think about what's going on in the heads of would-be founders may by now be thinking, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far.8

It's not just the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to think of math as a collection of programs of different types. And if you're not a genius, just start a startup to be rejected by most of them don't.9 In 1800, people could not see as readily as we can that a great artist. That's probably roughly how we looked when we were a bit like anaerobic respiration: not the optimum solution for the long term it's to your advantage to have kept looking, because you'll drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers. The opposing argument ad what most people would agree was absurdum. It's as relaxing as painting a wall. But if you had written your whole program by hand in machine language. As turned into de facto series B rounds. Of course, there are people you already know might send you an email talking about sex, and many of the current super-angels are in most respects mini VC funds, not the topic. How much of a market economy do. It's exceptionally rare for startups to grow. In an opera it's common for counterarguments to be aimed at something slightly different.

Here's a clue.10 If anyone wanted to try, we'd be interested to hear from them.11 If they don't need a big development team, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first 10 or so we intended to make this work.12 Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a site that seemed to me this couldn't possibly matter. Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth, like Google did.13 I began that essay, and even then they seem to be any less committed to the business. Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to say no to. They don't want founders to be nice people.14

Worrying that you're late. Now it's just one of the data types supported by the language. What about grad school? Our early training and our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the last to notice. Because few of us know any alternative, we have to go far down it before you start to lie to yourself.15 Every couple days I slip and call it Viaweb. I didn't prompt this one.

So while you'll probably survive, the problem now seems to be in New York, where people walk, but not an intolerable one. You find the same in music and art.16 If you have two choices, choose the most charismatic guy? Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. But their founders, like parents, truly believe they do.17 Whereas if you were about to do that is simply to state the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to get an offer from a better one in the 80s and 90s. A preliminary result, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been a one-time combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-takeover laws, starting with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Edgar v. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with but we're going to keep working on the startup, but it has been experimentally verified, in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience.

Notes

In the early empire the price, they did not become romantically involved till afterward. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the early years.

If all the other sheep head for a certain field, it's not lots of opportunities to sell early for us, the same work, the Patek Philippe 10 Day Tourbillon, is rated at-1. Not in New York the center of gravity of the world's population lives outside the US, it will become increasingly easy to discount knowledge that at some of the problem, but the churn is high as well, but this sort of person who would never even think of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a valuation cap.

Letter to the problem and approached it with the idea of starting a startup to duplicate our software, we should remember this when he was made a Knight of the conversion of buildings not previously public, like languages and safe combinations, and it has about the difference. That should probably be worth approaching—if you don't even want to start some vaguely benevolent business. You're going to do, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

Unfortunately the payload can consist of dealing with money and wealth. The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of three stakes. This is, it is certainly part of grasping evolution was to reboot them, initially, to get them to justify choices inaction in particular made for other kinds of companies that can't reasonably expect to do certain kinds of menial work early in the general sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like getting attention in the few cases where you get to be evidence of spam in my incoming mail fluctuated so much in their lifetimes.

Hypothesis: Any plan in 2001, but as a high school textbooks.

First Industrial Revolution was one that had other meanings are fairly closely related.

I'm talking mainly about software startups. I had a strange feeling of being Turing equivalent, but one by one they die and their hands thus tended to make a country, the top and get pushed down by new arrivals.

But you couldn't do the equivalent thing for founders; if they seem to have them soon.

The reason not to say Hey, that's not likely to come in and convince them. Handy that, in the imprecise half. What, you're pretty well protected against such tricks will approach.

I didn't realize it till I started doing research for this purpose are still called the executive model. Top VC firms have started to give you more inequality. The Roman commander specifically ordered that he could accept it. There are a different type of product for it.

While the US since the war. In fact the decade preceding the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to starting startups since Viaweb, and then stopped believing, so it's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day is the place of Napster. When we got to targeting when I first met him, but it's always better to read a draft of this desirable company, and FreeBSD 1.

Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1983. But I know, Lisp code.

It's unpleasant because the early adopters you evolve the idea that they either have a taste for interesting ideas: Paul Buchheit for the desperate and the low countries, where there were no strong central governments.

For example, being a train car that in practice that doesn't seem an impossible hope. There are also startlingly popular on Delicious, but countless other startups, so problems they face are probably not quite as easy as I explain later. It would help Web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. You can have margins big enough to become one of the reason this subject is so contentious is that in fact they don't know yet what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is less secure.

Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them. Unless of course finding words this way would be to write great software in Lisp, you may get both simultaneously. Japan is prone to earthquakes, so had a juicy bug to track ratios by time of unprecedented federal power, in response to the frightening lies told by older siblings.

The hardest kind of protection is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. One YC founder who used to build little Web appliances. It's hard to mentally deal with slaps, but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on a hard technical problem. Simpler just to go to work late at night, and both used their position to amass fortunes among the bear gardens and whorehouses.

A more powerful than ever. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the mail by Anton van Straaten on semantic compression.

Thanks to Emmett Shear, Ian Hogarth, Robert Morris, Adaptive Path, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Dan Siroker, Geoff Ralston, and Steve Huffman for putting up with me.

[melvinfellerstuff]

Melvin Feller Discusses Ways for Landlords to Become Better Organized.

Melvin Feller Discusses Ways for Landlords to Become Better Organized.

 Melvin Feller Business Ministries Group in Burkburnett and Dallas Texas and Lawton Oklahoma. Our mission is to call and equip a generation of Christian entrepreneurs to do business as ministry. We provide workshops and resources that help companies discover how to do business God’s way. When the heart of a business is service rather than self it can be transformed into a fruitful business ministry earning a profit and being of service to the community and their customers. Melvin Feller is currently pursuing another graduate degree in business organizations.

   Owning rental property can be a great source of secondary income but it can also be an extreme headache if not approached correctly. Many people jump right into the investing game with little background or education on how the game actually works, and often find themselves up the creek without a paddle. There are tips and tricks that you can implement to help minimize your headaches and maximize your return on investment. Although it is impossible to plan for all circumstances, you can absolutely minimize your risks by following a few of these tips to help avoid the rental nightmares.

    Solid Application Process

   Having a strict application process can immediately weed out potential tenants that you would not want to rent to. You can learn a lot about a potential tenant from the information they provide. You can access information about their references, employment history, whether or not they are smokers, have they ever been convicted of a crime, etc. Charge an application fee to cover the costs of running a credit and criminal background check. If an applicant can't afford to pay the $20 application fee, how can you expect them to pay the $900 a month rent payment? Running a credit report and criminal background check is necessary. Accessing this type of information allows you to get a good idea of the individual’s debt vs. income ratio, how timely they have been on past payments, etc.

     Security Deposit

   Collecting a security deposit is an absolute must. Do not rent to someone without collecting a deposit. Period. You need to be aware of and follow any state laws and regulations regarding the amount you can legally collect for a deposit. Most commonly, a deposit can be equal to one month's rent. No matter what the law might be, you must collect a deposit of some sort.  Deposits will save you future headaches and help you avoid paying out of pocket for damage your tenants are responsible for paying.

      Leases

  Have everything in writing, always have some sort of documentation, and keep copies on file. I do not care if you are renting to your cousin, brother, sister, or mother; have a lease of some sort! It is often a good idea to have your lawyer or attorney review or even write your lease so that you have some assurance of its strength and legality.

   Responsiveness

  Responding to your tenants' complaints and issues appropriately is very important. If you are timely in completing repairs your tenants will be appreciative and be more apt to pay rent on time. Promptly dealing with repairs is the best way to build a solid relationship with your tenants.

  Relationships

  It is important to establish a professional relationship with all of your tenants. Showing your tenants that you genuinely care about their living conditions makes for a much better tenancy - you may even be able to turn bad tenants in to good tenants! That being said, it is always important to make the distinction between being friendly and being friends; you must create a policy and stick to it.

   Continuing Education

  Education is the key to success, and knowing the ins and outs of how rental property and investments work will make you a better off landlord. You should constantly be updating your knowledge on local laws and regulations, including tenant and landlord rights, fire and safety code, and many others.

   Property Management

  If you are using a property management company, be sure to do your homework. Check references, interview the individuals and get a good feel for the people who will be working for you. Always monitor your monthly statements and make sure the work being done is professional and by someone licensed and bonded.

   Not a 9 to 5 Job

 In case you did not already know, being a landlord is NOT a 9-to-5 job. You never know what issues are going to arise, but when they do, they always seem to happen at the most inconvenient times. If you are currently a landlord or thinking of becoming one, there are some key skills you must possess and perfect.

   Time Management

  A s I said, you never know what issues will come up, but when they do, you have to set aside time to figure out a plan of attack and fix the issue quickly. Far too often, I see landlords who do not have quality time management skills and their lack of skill affects the entire building. First, the lawn is not mowed and the grass becomes overgrown. Next, the paint begins to peel. Then garbage begins to pile up around the building. Before you know it, you have lost your "curb appeal." Because there is no "curb appeal”, you have a hard time finding quality renters and become desperate. Finally, you find someone who seems to have their act together and you think, "I'll just rent to these guys. I don't have time to perform a credit and background check or call their references." Because you "didn't have the time" to properly vet your new tenants, they now are not paying their rent and you have to file for eviction, which costs you a couple thousand dollars in lost rent and court/attorney fees. You are now left with a unit that has been abused in every way possible and you need to repair/repaint walls, deeply clean everything, etc., etc., etc. Everyone knows someone like this - someone that just has so much going on that they cannot seem to find the time to do the necessary things needed to maintain their rental property.

    Organization

  A huge part of time management is organization. If you are organized then everything just goes more smoothly. As a landlord, a big part of being organized is developing a detailed filing system. When you are organized, you will not spend your time looking for lost things like that heating bill, or that maintenance request, or the telephone number to the contractor who is supposed to come and repair your kitchen floor, because you will know exactly where it all is.

  Things you absolutely need to file are:

Bills

Maintenance requests and tenant complaints

Rental applications, must be kept for at least 1 year because applicants have a year to appeal if they feel they were discriminated against

Vendor W-9s Rental receipts Prior tax returns Leases

Any notices you have ever given to a tenant

  Communication

  Another key to being a good landlord is developing your active listening skills. When your tenants feel that you actually care about the issue at hand, things seem to go a little smoother. Take time to listen to what the tenant has to say and after they are done, reiterate what they have said back to them to make sure you have the details down. This will tell the tenant you have been listening and will give them confidence that you will handle the issue at hand.

Answer your phone and/or return calls within a reasonable amount of time. When a tenant calls you with an issue, do not wait a week to call them back. What kind of message do you think that sends?

    Budgeting

  A lot of issues landlords face are directly related to money in one way or another. The best way to avoid issues with money is to create a budget and monitor it! I review all of my budgets once a month. This will allow you to see where your money is going and develop a plan to increase your income and decrease your expenses. With a budget, you can also set money aside every month to make necessary repairs and develop a "slush fund" for those unpredictable events such as frozen pipes, appliance failure, and code violations.

   Finally, Treat Landlording as a Business Not a Hobby!!

 Yes, owning rental property is a business. If it were not, you wouldn't be paying taxes! When things need to be done, it is always better to do them ASAP rather than dragging your heels. Landlords have the amazing job of providing people with a place to live that is comfortable and enjoyable. However, things do not always go as planned and hard decisions need to be made. I like to say that there is a very fine line between being "friends" with tenants and being "friendly" towards tenants.

   Melvin Feller Business Consultants Ministries Group in Texas and Oklahoma. Melvin Feller founded Melvin Feller Business Consultants Group Ministries in the 1970s to help individuals and organizations achieve their specific Victory. Victory as defined by the individual or organization are achieving strategic objectives, exceeding goals, getting results or desired outcomes. He has extensive experience assisting businesses achieve top and bottom line results. He has broad practical experience creating WINNERS in many organizations and industries. He has hands-on experience in executive leadership, operations, logistics, sales, program management, organizational development, training and customer service. He has coached teams to achieve results in strategic planning, business development, organizational design, sales, and customer response and business process improvement. He has prepared and presented many workshops nationally and

Melvin Feller Business Organization Graduate                internationally.

Candidate, Business Owner and Business Coach

[bertievi]

I am unwell today so go easy on me XD . I woke up to a hung parliament and just went back to bed because nope. It was a selfish idea to hold an election, TM did make a mistake but if she had won the majority then she would have been able to take the stance she's wanted with brexit. While a soft exit would have been grand and dandy, it's something we're never going to have. I posted on another blog about the brexit mess and what triggering article 50 actually means. While we have EU *friends* they don't give a potato about what we want, they know what they want and with 27 other countries to negotiate with, a soft approach just... well it won't work for us. I mean come on, who pulled the £50bn number out their arse??? 

Next is the young vote for Labour with regards to university fees. I was entering my first year when Cameron lifted the cap on fees. That was £9k a year for me as appose to the £3k my sister paid and that bloody sucked! But to abolish fees altogether? Are you mental? It's a nice fantasy that higher education is free for all and I wish it could be done but how would universities fund themselves? The government? (Oh I'll be throwing poop from that below too). How would they function? Research isn't cheap, highly qualified researchers and lectures aren't cheap either. Already I've seen my university struggling and having to make cuts. I'm aware they're in significant debt but add the lack of that potential funding from students themselves and my 200+ year old university that supports a student population of roughly 60k (that's big in Wales) would struggle or even close. Then no one gets a degree, free or not. But that's just one university, right? Right? I would worry over the start of a brain drain, why would top lecturers stick around here if they could get paid more elsewhere? Patriotism doesn't do well against a higher wage in a sunnier setting.

Next was the promises over the NHS, yes it's in a mess at the moment and we seriously need to look into helping it as much as possible but the promise of extra funding, while dreamy, where would it have come from? If they had already taken student funding from universities, which would have the universities crying out for funding on top of the struggling NHS, not even ludicrous taxes on the rich would be able to support that sort of funding pool. Yes, I totally agree that a lot more money and thinking needs to go into our health service and that is really something I hope we hold onto even while attentions turn to Brexit negotiations in 12days time.

The next was promise of extra policing, again, where would the money come from? While we all want to feel safe and after their terror attacks we have had a surge of volunteers joining the police force, again it was a lovely fantasy that it could all be done, free universities, funding the NHS, paying for more training, equipment and police officers. But they were still pulling numbers from the sky.

And higher wages!! Dreamy! But the unemployment rate would rocket, employers can't afford £10 an hour as a minimum wage. Those that get those free degrees don't get anything for them in the end, if you enter a specialist environment with your hard earned degree yet can still only be paid minimum wage? Well, wouldn't that feel like a bit of a kick in the teeth after all that stressing over deadlines?

The promises were fanciful, yes lovely and I wish it were possible and believe me if it were I'd be ranting about how happy I was about it all but it's simply not possible. The numbers involved are in the billions and I have no clue where JC and crew were going to pull them from without throwing us into bankruptcy. It's something of a tradition that they mess up the country financially and the Tories inherit the problem and have to fix it. 

Personally, I believe that a lot of the promises from JC and TF for that matter, were ploys to snatch votes. Knowing they wouldn't have the majority, in promising such happy things that would honestly get people to dream about it, they could gain seats without ever having to worry about delivering on those promises. The party gains but the country flails... much like the stupid decision to hold a referendum in the first place and then an election less than two weeks before negotiations. 

I'm glad TM isn't stepping down if it meant that BJ got the Tories. We would seriously be the laughing stock with JC as PM and BJ as leader of the opposition. *shudders* 

The Tories made their mistakes too, true it was an arrogant move but I can see the logic behind it. From the outside with labour fighting itself, Lib dems seemingly trying to take their back seats again Tories seemed like the most stable and strongest party to go in and sort out this Brexit business. It was an unworthy gamble though, now they don't have the majority and HM The Queen should damn well scold TM for making a move in the first place. They were plucking numbers form the air too and trying to brush policies like care for the elderly in with the doom and gloom suggestions in the hope no one would notice it as a big issue.

Policians are slimy, we all know that. I said in the tags of a previous post that I know far too many that blindly vote because they have always voted for a certain party, or that their parents told them who to vote for. And sadly I think that's what's a lot of them count on you doing. It was good news to learn of the turn outs in constituencies, but 60-70% is still not 100%... honestly you have no excuses not to vote! But that's a post for another time.

I actually really like Welsh Labour, if Mr Jones was party leader in Westminister, I'm actually pretty sure he would have won. For the Assembly elections, I vote for him because I know I can trust him with his level and honest head to look after Wales with some common sense. I cannot trust JC though, his promises are so nice and he can lure you in with them, but they just make no sense. TM is brutal in her ways, her talks and promises are not sunshine and rainbows but in the current climate, they're honest. We can't have free universities, we desperately need to find a better way to run and fund the NHS and we do need to worry about security on all fronts. I think if JC had won and was going into Brexit talks, I would have applied for my Irish passport and left. 

[katierojasblog]

Letter to my representative

Dear Mr. Knight,

I have grown up in the SCV community since it was a dusty, undeveloped landscape. On my street, the only melanin I saw was in the hot, tired gardeners that everyone paid $20 a week to mow their lawns, and my dad, who coincidentally was the only homeowner who tended their own lawn (maybe he wasn't afraid of the sun like everyone else seemed to be). My schools were similar, in that the majority of the students were white. I remember my young brother got called in for random drug testing - in the eighth grade - three times in one year. Do you think that would have happened if his last name was Smith?

It's no surprise that my overwhelmingly white, wealthy town is also overwhelmingly Republican-- which is why, obviously, you're here on this formal .gov address, representing all of our voices. We live in a community far away from the scary trailer parks and projects. Some fortunate residents even living within fancy gates just to prove how safe and hard-working they are! So I get why you aren't afraid to fall in line with other Republicans. Look at all these rich constituents who love their tax cuts, why give to those less fortunate when we can let the free market sort them out? They just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps like we did! We deserve to keep our money so we can build more gates, more Whole Foods markets, more Camarros!

I see this mentality, the wealth. We drown in it, while ignoring that 10 miles away people are struggling to feed their families. So while maybe you and I can afford our nice healthcare plans, people outside our conservative bubble can't. What is the point of choice when every choice is unreasonably expensive? You don't even have to listen to me and my silly liberal thoughts. Just listen to the experts like the AMA, or the CBO.

People are going to die if this bill, or any similar short-sighted repeal of the ACA, passes. And just because those deaths will be those of the elderly, or minorities, or the poor, doesn't make them any less important. America is the greatest country on earth, a true economic and social powerhouse. If we have the monetary resources to fund healthcare, then why wouldn't we? If our founding fathers knew we would be this rich, this fortunate, this privileged, then do you really think they wouldn't consider affordable healthcare a right of each American?

If you don't particularly enjoy my appeal to pathos, let me attempt to appeal to your logos. Poor health keeps people from working and contributing to the economy. Poor people are going to pay for their heart medication before buying a home. I'm not even advocating for a single-payer system. Countries such as Canada have thrived with their multi-payer system that still makes healthcare almost completely free for those who cannot afford it.

Every other powerful country sees our healthcare system as barbaric and yet another unnecessary roadblock to the success of our less fortunate members. How are the unfortunate supposed to afford education and technical training if they have to choose between eating this week and getting their appendix removed?

I know that Republicans don't actually buy into the idea that the free market will take care of the American people's health issues. Yet you all peddle this lie that free health insurance would demotivate people to work, when in reality it would stimulate the economy by improving worker health. We wealthy people can live without that extra thousand each year if it means that those in need can at least be on equal footing with us when it comes to something as basic as health. I have been fortunate enough to go to school for a study that will earn me a lot of money in the future. I promise you that I do not need that extra thousand if it means I can contribute to something greater than myself. Paul Ryan so desperately wants tax cuts that he is willing to rip away poor people's chances for prosperity.

And you, Mr. Knight, openly champion of this toxic mentality. Try going to poor communities, looking these people in the eyes, and telling them that they will lose their healthcare and that they should just work harder if they want to die less quickly. You can pretend that you're safe in your little conservative bubble, that 2018 will have your back, but just know that if you walk into congress this Thursday with your shiny shoes and fancy suit and the word "yea" escapes your mouth, I will NEVER stop calling, emailing, protesting, writing, and voting to prevent you from taking office again. I will constantly work to show your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren, that you and all the people like you were on the wrong side of history. And there are other people like me, who are not afraid to call out the injustice that this transition of power has brought upon our home.

In this moment, America must look at itself in the mirror and ask who she truly is. My America protects its immigrants, its sick, its poor, its elderly, and its brown. My America will make sure that future generations have equal opportunity to succeed, where those on top admit that this society has allowed them to get where they are and that it is their duty to give back to those who aren't as fortunate. Your America, Mr. Knight, will not survive the progress of history and the resistance of those within it. You can try to slow it down all you want, but come 2020 you will realize that Trump was the dying breath of your party.

[mastcomm]

I am not unfavourable, America actually is screwed

Trump supporters in America in assist of MAGA

By Umair Haque

A couple of years in the past, I wrote a put up referred to as “Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse.” Sadly, I feel my predictions have confirmed to be true — although I suppose you may choose that for your self. 90,000 useless and counting. A president who calls the demise toll a “badge of honor.” A paralysed Congress. 40 million unemployed. Right now, I typically get the query, “Why are you unfavourable, Umair?” or, “What may be executed to repair all this?” These are actually the identical query, and my reply, which you most likely received’t like, goes like this: we’re nonetheless underestimating American collapse.

The economics of American collapse say that it’s most likely too late to repair America. It’s possible that that is the brand new regular. Chaos, decline, incompetence, malice, poverty, hopelessness, despair.

Let me clarify, as clearly as I can.

You possibly can see, proper about now, that America is what political scientists name a failed state. A President who tells folks to drink bleach throughout a pandemic. 90,000 useless, of which 90% are pointless. A society that’s not in a position to present fundamentals for it’s residents anymore. A nation through which earnings, financial savings, life expectancy, happiness, belief are all in free-fall. That is the stuff of epic social collapse.

Umair Haque: one other perception on state of America

Now, the explanation that America collapsed is simple. People by no means invested in constructing expansive social techniques, not like Europe. Methods to offer healthcare, retirement, childcare, finance, and so forth.

The consequence has been twofold. One, the common American now goes with out these items. That’s as a result of they’re largely unavailable. For instance, the contemporary meals that I can get on any block in Europe is solely absent in enormous chunks of the States. You purchase processed meals, otherwise you don’t get meals. The identical is true of many, many issues, like, say, training, or earnings. You don’t have a job with ensures and protections like in Canada or Europe. You’ve gotten a decrease high quality — not simply amount — of earnings.

Two, the common American pays costs that the remainder of the world considers completely absurd — as a result of they’re — for the exact same issues. Having a baby? That’ll be $50Okay, thanks. An operation? That’ll be greater than a home. Wish to educate a child? There go your life financial savings. Need a number of contemporary apples? That’ll be ten instances the worth Canadians or Europeans pay. This stuff — the fundamentals of life — are eminently inexpensive in the remainder of the wealthy world. In America, although, they price greater than the common particular person can afford.

How do I do know that? As a result of the common American now dies in debt. Their complete life is one lengthy sequence of unpayable money owed now. First, there’s “lunch debt” which turns into “pupil debt” which turns into a mortgage and bank card debt which turns into “medical debt.” The types of debt in quotes don’t even exist in most different wealthy nations. In America, although, they outline life — exactly as a result of the common American is now a poor particular person, within the sense that they will’t make ends meet with regards to paying for the fundamentals of life.

Certain, they could have an enormous automobile and massive home and an enormous gun. However the financial reality is that this: all these issues are had on debt, and the common American now lives like an impoverished particular person. No financial savings, no property, no liquidity. 80% — eighty % — of People stay paycheck to paycheck, wrestle to pay primary payments, and may’t increase say $500 for an emergency. These are the statistics of a nation having descended into poverty.

Now. I don’t write all that to make some theoretical level, so let’s come again to the query. Can America save itself from collapse? For those who actually perceive the numbers, then the reply above — sadly — is: most likely not. The economics say that America has roughly nearly definitely reached a degree of no return now, and collapse is sort of inevitable. To cease collapse, America must begin investing — massively, abruptly, traditionally — in functioning techniques. To cease longevity and well being cratering, it wants a healthcare system. To cease happiness and belief cratering, it wants inexpensive training and retirement. To cease incomes and financial savings plummeting, it wants retirement techniques and protections for staff. And so forth. Each single aspect of American collapse requires huge, large-scale, sustained public funding to be rotated, that goes on for a decade or extra.

Many People even assist that a lot. They get, by now, that and not using a new social contract, America is completed. Certain, the American Fool — Trump and his military of bleach-drinking morons — don’t. However perhaps the common American does — positive, let’s permit that a lot. The tragic wrinkle is that it makes no distinction. Even when the vast majority of People need a greater America — is it too late to truly construct one? Most likely.

Why? Effectively, who’s going to pay for it? Bear in mind these dismal statistics above? The typical American lives like a poor particular person now? So who precisely goes to pay for all these expansive new techniques? The typical particular person merely can’t afford the very enhancements to society that they want anymore. Bang! What occurs then? The reply is: nothing does. Extra of this does: a sluggish, stunning collapse and descent. As a result of there’s no different possibility, selection, various. No one a lot has the cash for one. You see, if I say to the common American — “let’s repair America. All it’s a must to do is pay ten % extra in taxes, and also you’ll have world-class healthcare, retirement, childcare, and so forth” — they could even assist it, whole-heartedly. They could genuinely need it.

However the financial reality is that they can not afford it. That ten % is now essential earnings. That’s what “the common American dies in debt” tells us. The typical particular person can’t hand over that ten %. She or he wants it — often desperately — to repay easy on a regular basis payments. They don’t have any actual financial savings to talk of. So the place is the cash to fund this glorious new social contract going to come back from? The bitter reality is that this: People at the moment are too poor to afford a greater social contract. Even when People assist a Canadian or European model social contract, the onerous financial reality is which might be most likely now too poor to ever have one. People at the moment are so poor they will barely afford to assist themselves and their very own —80% stay on the edge — so how can they afford to assist anybody else, not to mention everybody else?

That’s not just a few idle opinion. You possibly can see stark proof of those deadly economics already doing their work. People simply rejected their greatest probability at reform in generations, Bernie and Liz Warren. That was on the left — the 70% or who say they need first rate healthcare, retirement, training, and so forth. Solely they by no means, ever vote for it, when it comes right down to it. Why? Elevating the spectre of upper taxes to fund a functioning society is one thing that merely can’t be borne by even those that need. No one can afford it now. Even People who say they need a greater society don’t appear ready — predictably, persistently — to observe by now. There’s a cause for that, and it’s that America is just too poor as a rustic to afford to be a functioning society anymore.

Even when, as Bernie promised, taxes wouldn’t rise — People don’t appear to consider it. Why not? It’s not simply they don’t — with good cause — mistrust their authorities. It’s additionally that they will’t bear any extra uncertainty. When your complete life and future appears to be going up in smoke, whenever you bear all the chance in society — the very last thing you may take is much more. So whereas Bernie and Liz may need championed a functioning society on the similar tax fee, the chance of taking having to pay for a functioning society is solely now an excessive amount of for People who already stay on the edge. What if taxes do find yourself rising by 5 %? Once you’re already perpetually struggling? Bang! Then it’s recreation over. People can’t afford to bear the dangers or prices of basic reforms to a damaged society, and that seals in collapse as the one trajectory left to observe.

On the precise, by the best way, individuals are so confused and bewildered that, just like the protesters above, they’re keen to surrender their lives to maintain their livelihoods. That’s how determined issues have gotten. See the purpose: on the left, folks would possibly desire a functioning society, however by no means, ever vote for it, as a result of no one can afford it, whereas the precise has given up on it altogether, hoping just for the prospect to be exploited, simply as long as meals can nonetheless be placed on the desk. That leaves…no one a lot…in society…who each needs a functioning nation, and may afford to pay for it.

Certain, it’s true that firms and the tremendous wealthy may be taxed. And they need to be, closely. However that’s not sufficient. There’s a cause that Europe and Canada ask folks to pay greater taxes to assist a greater social contract, and that cause is that’s the solely method such a contract is sustainable. You possibly can’t get there from a one-off tax on firms and the wealthy alone.

It’s additionally true that if America had been to construct a greater social contract — with say good healthcare and retirement and so forth — everybody’s payments would decline over time. However that doesn’t resolve the issue, which is that People can’t afford the prices within the first place. Certain, if American had public healthcare, folks wouldn’t should pay $10Okay per particular person per yr for it. However they do — and it’s not as if somebody’s magically going to lift their incomes by that a lot in the event that they don’t. Do you suppose company America’s going to present anybody a increase simply because it’s paying much less in healthcare prices? That’s why all of the plans for overhauling America’s damaged public healthcare system contain, nonetheless, employers paying into some type of fund — no one needs to present folks extra money. However with out giving folks extra money, People keep too poor to stay in something however…the collapsing society America’s develop into.

If that doesn’t make sense, simply give it some thought in your individual life. May you actually afford to lose 10% of your earnings proper about now? Ever? Extra probably, like most People, your life is balanced proper on the razor’s edge. A couple of % both method, and — kaput!! — you lose most or every part you might have. There goes the mortgage, college, the credit score ratin, and so forth. The plainer financial translation of that’s: you’re too poor to afford a functioning society. You possibly can barely assist your individual — how will you assist anybody, everybody, else?

So how was America left too poor to afford something however collapse? In Europe and Canada, there’s a sure type of equity that got here to prevail. Individuals pay about half their incomes in taxes. Half for me, half for everybody else. However that additionally implies that society’s surplus is distributed way more equitably within the first place. That half you pay in taxes goes on to make use of medical doctors, nurses, professors, public servants of all types that merely don’t exist in America. It’s used to spend money on hospitals, colleges, universities, parks, libraries — each single yr. That’s been taking place for one thing like 50 years by now: a cycle of equitable redistribution that turned sustained funding and reinvestment. What occurs if you happen to spend money on a factor like a park, hospital, library for 50 years? It will get higher and higher. Its returns develop and develop. There’s extra of every part to go round for everybody. The battle for self-preservation doesn’t lock folks into poverty, because it has in America. That’s what it means to be a very wealthy society.

America’s been doing precisely the other, for a similar fifty years, and longer. See any reinvestment in…something? Every part’s decrepit, from airports to varsities to libraries, exactly as a result of there hasn’t been any. There hasn’t been any — or sufficient, in any case — as a result of People didn’t need to pay these greater taxes Europeans and Canadians did. They believed the unusual, silly, and evidence-free ideologies of trickle-down economics and neoliberalism and all the remainder of it — we’ll all be richest if we spend money on…exactly nothing collectively. No one ought to care about anybody else. No one ought to ever assist anybody else within the pursuit of something. Life was to be purely individualistic, adversarial, and acquisitive.

That led People straight right into a poverty lure. They had been paying decrease taxes, positive. However their public items had been decaying. Their frequent wealth was eroding. Their techniques and establishments had been corroding. What occurs to steel that isn’t polished, a road that’s by no means cleaned, a home that’s by no means repaired? Effectively, in the long run, it’s a must to pay an even bigger invoice. However you may not be capable to afford it by then. Bang! You then’re executed. You reside in that crumbling home till it lastly turns to mud, if you happen to can’t pay the roofer, plumber, electrician. That’s the place America is now.

Are you aware what a poverty lure is? When a poor particular person spends greater than wealthy folks simply to have the fundamentals — consider a poor particular person spending most of their earnings on low-quality meals, transportation, drugs, and so forth, as a result of it’s all they will get. That’s the place America is now, from a worldwide perspective. In a traditional poverty lure. Too poor to ever afford to be wealthy once more, as a result of it doesn’t have the cash to spend money on it’s personal self-improvement or betterment now. A long time of underinvestment imply that there was much less and fewer to go round — till American life turned a brutal each day battle for self-preservation. However when all you are able to do is barely even wrestle to protect your self, put meals on the desk, maintain your loved ones afloat — what do you might have left to present again to a greater society? Nothing, is the grim reply, and it’s borne out by America’s spectacularly low — unfavourable — financial savings fee, aka, everybody however the mega-rich dies in debt.

To attain European or Canadian dwelling requirements, how a lot would America have to take a position now? Consider it: gleaming hospitals for everybody, thriving public squares, expansive childcare, good retirement, jobs that pay the payments, oversight of all of it. It might take trillions. Most likely dozens of trillions. A lot, far more than common People all put collectively can afford to spend now. These are the brutal economics of collapse. Societies who let themselves develop into poor can hardly then wave a magic need and develop into wealthy.

What it means to be a poor society, which is what America has develop into, can be the expertise of life in it by now: political chaos, financial wreck, emotional paralysis, cultural degeneration. Europe and Canada, once more, have been investing in life for many years, whereas America’s been ignoring it. The result’s that they’re forward now — and America most likely can’t ever catch up. America let itself develop into a poor society, and this — the chaos and dislocation of now — is what it means to be one.

I do know that is grim studying. It’s horrible and horrific. Is it “unfavourable,” although? Effectively, I do know that it comes throughout that method. I need to do a job that the everyday pundit received’t, although, which is attempt to inform you easy truths. The one which economics tells me is that this.

It’s too late for America to get better. It left it too lengthy. It was conceited and immodest, paying for issues it didn’t want, like wars and mega-mansions, however not these it did. So it didn’t make investments when it ought to have, however now the invoice is due, however no one will pay it. What do you name a society like that? Bankrupt. Identical to most People are, solely they don’t comprehend it. What do you name an entire society of individuals, in any case, who die in debt?America’s broke, my mates. And whenever you’re broke, what do you might have left to spend money on your self?

There’s a technique out, by the best way, if you happen to’ve adopted me carefully. Give folks cash. No strings connected, no questions requested, now, on a large-scale, roughly completely, neglect how a lot must be borrowed to make it occur. So folks can fund a working society once more. Or else. That’s the large query for America. The remaining is noise. Till one thing alongside these traces begins to take form — my reply is easy: People made themselves too poor to now afford to have the luxurious of a functioning, civilised, trendy society. Or is all {that a} necessity?

*Umair first printed this in Medium

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com.ng/opinion/i-am-not-unfavourable-america-actually-is-screwed/

[jeroldlockettus]

Is the Protestant Work Ethic Real? (Ep. 360)

People who are involved in religion tend to have lower rates of drug use, higher levels of happiness, and longer lives. But does religion actually cause any of that? (Photo: Kevin Dooley/Flickr)

In the early 20th century, Max Weber argued that Protestantism created wealth. Finally, there are data to prove if he was right. All it took were some missionary experiments in the Philippines and a clever map-matching trick that goes back to 16th-century Germany.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Dean Karlan is an academic economist, and also—

Dean KARLAN: I am president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Which is what?

KARLAN: Which is a nonprofit organization which helps do research to figure out what works, and what doesn’t, to fight poverty and social problems around the world.

Karlan, who’s at Northwestern, was teaching at Yale back in 2011, when he co-authored a book called More Than Good Intentions.

KARLAN: And one of the reasons I wrote this book was to help philanthropists make better decisions.

Karlan was headed to Hong Kong to give a talk about the book when something really great happened.

KARLAN: I got an email from a guy, from a secretary to a guy, who was the chief financial officer for Morgan Stanley in Asia Pacific.

That sounded like just the kind of philanthropist Karlan was hoping to meet.

David SUTHERLAND: And he was hoping he was going to get a big grant from Morgan Stanley.

And that’s the guy — an American named David Sutherland, who’d been working in Asia since the 1990s. He was in Washington, D.C., before that, including a stint as a tax lawyer with the Treasury Department. So now —

SUTHERLAND: I got a little flyer from the Foreign Correspondents Club that said this guy named Dean Karlan was coming to Hong Kong. So I said, “I want to meet with this guy.”

KARLAN: And I was like, “Perfect, this is why I wrote the book. Sure, happy to have breakfast.”

SUTHERLAND: I met him for breakfast, and 10 minutes into the conversation, he realized he was just talking to somebody who wanted to talk about his own charity.

So no, Sutherland was not going to write Karlan a big check. But was it possible he could offer something even more valuable?

KARLAN: And he got out these reams of folders with tons and tons of spreadsheets and tables. And he said, basically, “My passion is this group called I.C.M. in the Philippines, of which I’m chairman of the board, and here’s all the things we’re doing.”

I.C.M. stands for International Care Ministries; it’s a Christian organization serving what it calls the ultra poor.

SUTHERLAND: The people that we work with, they are living lives in desperate poverty. They don’t have enough food to eat. Thirty-two percent of all the mothers have had one of their own children die, and eight percent have had more than one of their children die.

Sutherland and his wife have three kids of their own. His family first heard about I.C.M. back in 1998.

SUTHERLAND: And it just really moved our hearts. So we started investing a little bit of money, and then just over time, it grew and grew and grew. And we got more and more involved.

I.C.M. today has an annual budget of around $10 million — and Sutherland, by the way, no longer works at Morgan Stanley. I.C.M. in the past decade has served roughly 200,000 Filipinos. Its core program is called Transform. Its curriculum has three components: health and nutrition training; teaching “livelihood,” or economic skills; and religious instruction.

SUTHERLAND: My view is that for sure, there’s a lot of fantastic secular charities in this world. But for me, I wanted to be involved in something that reaches the whole person. And for me, that is both physical poverty and spiritual poverty.

I.C.M. works with a network of some 10,000 pastors.

SUTHERLAND: And these pastors are Protestant pastors. We teach a basic evangelical message that everyone has sinned, they need to put their faith in Christ, and that that is the key to freedom for them.

The Philippines, we should note, is overwhelmingly Catholic; it’s only around 6 percent Protestant.

SUTHERLAND: I often say the Protestants are like anarchy. Some guy wakes up in the morning and he decides he wants to be a pastor. He just wakes up and he puts a sign in his front door and says, “We are now the Church of Jesus Christ of Heaven and Earth.” And there, he’s a pastor. Actually about a third of the pastors we work with are women. Their entire ecosystem is just the hundred families that they can see out front of their door. So they know which husband cheats on his wife, they know who sings good at karaoke, they know which little girl broke her leg. Having that connectivity with the local people that we’re trying to help is a core tenet that allows I.C.M. to reach those very poor people.

So Sutherland had great faith in the reach of his pastor network.

SUTHERLAND: We can find the poorest people, we can reach them very, very efficiently.

So he knew that I.C.M. was good at bringing poor people into the program.

SUTHERLAND: So the only thing that we need to know for sure is whether the program that we run is in fact effective.

Aha! Enter Dean Karlan. That was exactly the kind of research he tried to do with Innovations for Poverty Action. And he was well-acquainted with the religious-based charity model: roughly 60 percent of American non-profits that work in international charity are religious.

KARLAN: And when I talked with some of these groups I would often hear claims made that they’re not doing the preaching just because they’re trying to spread their beliefs, but they actually believe that it’s changing economic outcomes.

So Karlan was as interested in answering Sutherland’s question as Sutherland was in having it answered.

KARLAN: So we do see a lot of correlations out there. People, where religion is a bigger part of their life, tend to drink less, do fewer drugs, live longer, report higher levels of happiness, do less crime, things of this nature. So lots of correlations.

Correlations yes but, as we’ve been preaching on this show for years, correlation does not equal causality. People like to use umbrellas when it’s raining. Do umbrellas cause rain? Science says no. What about religion? The economics literature has long noted that religiosity often coincides with attributes like diligence, thriftiness, and trust. But again, does religion cause any of this?

KARLAN: That’s the basic problem with why you can’t go out into a cross-section of the world and just compare religious people to non-religious people, and say, “Oh la la, look at these differences. Religion must have caused that to happen.

Karlan had long dreamed of running a randomized controlled trial, or R.C.T., to tease out the effect of religion itself. Where you’d have a control group and one or more treatment groups. Most religious charities, however, were not interested. David Sutherland could understand why:

SUTHERLAND: Too many of the faith-based organizations weren’t willing to set up a control group because they didn’t want to set aside a group of people they weren’t going to preach to.

But Sutherland himself didn’t think like that.

SUTHERLAND: If an R.C.T. showed that our current program was not effective, I want to know that as soon as possible so that we can pivot to a program that is even more effective.

And so it was that during that breakfast in Hong Kong, Dean Karlan realized that David Sutherland would be a willing partner in his long-standing desire to measure the economic effects of religious belief.

KARLAN: “Would you ever consider removing the religion from what you’re doing, so that we can understand how that influences the outcomes of your program?”

SUTHERLAND: So we ticked through all the boxes and in 10 minutes I said, “Yeah, all those things work for us, we’re happy to do that.”

After a few years of fund-raising and logistical planning, they began running this R.C.T. in the Philippines.

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Dean Karlan is hardly the only American economist interested in how religion shapes our economic lives. There’s the Association of Christian Economists; the Christian Finance Faculty Association; the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization, or CREDO.

James CHOI: We know that religion is one of the most important and powerful forces in society, and we just want to know, what effect does that have on all sorts of things, including economic outcomes.

That’s James Choi, a finance professor at Yale. He works with Karlan on Innovations for Poverty Action. The problem with doing economics-of-religion research is the lack of convincing evidence.

CHOI: There’s been a lot of suggestive evidence. What you really want to do for the purpose of social science, to identify an effect, is to randomly assign certain people to be a certain religion, and other people to be a different religion, and then just follow them forward and see, how do their economic outcomes differ? And that just doesn’t happen in the real world.

Choi did once try to get at this question in a lab experiment, using research subjects with different religious backgrounds.

CHOI: So they came into the lab and they did a series of sentence scrambles where they had to rearrange words in order to form English sentences that made sense. And half the subjects got sentences that had religious content in them, the other half didn’t. And so the theory was that those who got the religious sentences would have their religious identity made more salient to them, and the religious effects would be stronger for them.

Then Choi and his colleagues had the subjects play a game that measured how much they’d contribute to a public good.

CHOI: So this is a problem that society has to solve: how do we get people to contribute to public goods?

Public goods being things like the environment, or democracy, or safe streets.

CHOI: And what we did find was that when Protestants had their religious identity made salient to them, they contributed more to a laboratory public good. Whereas Catholics contributed less to the laboratory public good, and they expected others in the group to contribute less, so it seemed like they were less trusting.

Interesting, maybe, but Choi acknowledges the limits of this kind of research.

CHOI: Yeah, laboratory tasks, no matter how cleverly designed they are, no matter how compelling they are, at the end of the day that’s not real life. So the ultimate test really is, how do these interventions affect people’s real lives outside the laboratory?

The fact that economics doesn’t really have an answer about the effects of religion is pretty remarkable when you consider that roughly 8 out of 10 people on the planet identify themselves as religious. The three largest denominations are Christianity, with around 31 percent; Islam, 23 percent; and Hinduism, 15 percent. Christianity is most concentrated in the Americas, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa; the Middle East and North Africa, meanwhile, are 93 percent Muslim, while the Asia-Pacific region is the most variegated: just 7 percent Christian, with 24 percent Muslim, 25 percent Hindu, 12 percent Buddhist, 9 percent belonging to “folk religions,” and 21 percent unaffiliated. Jews, in case you’re wondering, make up 0.2 percent of the global population. And what about James Choi?

CHOI: Yes, I do consider myself religious. I identify as an evangelical Protestant.

Academia, as you likely know, is not exactly a hotbed of religious sentiment. Even so, Choi has never been shy about his own beliefs.

CHOI: If you think that what you believe matters for where you’re going to go for the rest of eternity, then why wouldn’t you want to share that with other people?

On his Yale faculty website, Choi has a page that reads, “Why I am a Christian (Even Though I Don’t Believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy).”

KARLAN: And actually, that post is part of the reason why we ended up working together.

Dean Karlan again. He was raised Jewish and now considers himself agnostic. Back when he was on the Yale faculty, with James Choi, he’d seen that Easter Bunny page.

KARLAN: One night at dinner, I brought it up.

CHOI: What we were talking about was how might we identify the effect of religion.

KARLAN: So we started brainstorming about how to actually test this.

CHOI: And we had the crazy idea that we would find some missionary organization that went out and evangelized to rural villages that were all isolated from each other. And we would try to convince this missionary organization to randomize which villages they went to and which villages they didn’t go to. Of course, this is crazy talk, and this idea went nowhere.

It went nowhere until a few years later, when Karlan had that breakfast in Hong Kong with David Sutherland.

CHOI: And then Dean excitedly contacted me. He said, “I found just the organization that can do this, and this is International Care Ministries. And they are a very data-driven organization, and they care about whether their programs are actually helping people.” And so they were willing to randomly assign which villages ended up getting different versions of their programs.

Okay, here’s how I.C.M.’s Transform program typically works. The participants — most of them women, and self-identified as Catholic, and all of them excruciatingly poor — they’d meet once a week for roughly four months. The meetings were usually held in a church building — but, again, even the I.C.M. pastors have very little money; the building might have a dirt floor, a scrap roof, and no electricity.

SUTHERLAND: So every meeting is 90 minutes long: 30 minutes of values, 30 minutes of health, 30 minutes of livelihood: V.H.L.

David Sutherland again:

SUTHERLAND: So we train the pastor to teach the values curriculum, the spiritual part of the curriculum, and they get 30 minutes each week. We teach them about the love of God, our respect for biblical principles, how Christ can help you to solve your day-to-day problems.

And then there are the two non-religious components of the program: health instruction—

SUTHERLAND: We will have our own person, an I.C.M. employee, that we train as a health trainer.

KARLAN: They’re taught ideas about hygiene, nutrition, provided nutritional supplements for children.

And the “livelihood” portion.

SUTHERLAND: And we have our own livelihood person trained by I.C.M.

KARLAN: The term livelihood in this context refers to economic activity.

SUTHERLAND: We show them how to do organic gardening, which is very low-cash. And then a few weeks later, you can have vegetables to feed your kids.

KARLAN: There’s lessons about small-business enterprises, how to get that started. A small grant often goes with that. They also form a savings group, so there’s a financial-inclusion aspect to the program.

So that’s the typical 90-minute weekly meeting: one-third economic-livelihood, one-third health and nutrition, one-third religious instruction. David Sutherland and I.C.M. suspected the program was helpful, long-term; but was it helpful because of the religious values? That is what Dean Karlan, James Choi, and a third economist — Gharad Bryan — set out to learn. The first step in a randomized controlled trial is to randomize. They started by recruiting 160 pastors affiliated with I.C.M., and having each pastor identify two Philippine villages where they had never worked. And in each of those two villages—

CHOI: We had the pastors go out and pick out what they believed to be the 30 poorest families in each of these communities. And then we randomly assigned which community the pastor would be ministering to.

KARLAN: So they would flip a coin about which village they actually went and worked in, and then we used the other one as the comparison. So we had four different treatment arms to the study. We had one treatment arm that received the full package.

The “full package” meaning the standard Transform curriculum: equal parts religious values, health and nutrition, and economic livelihood.

KARLAN: For another quarter of the villages, just the pastor went, not the I.C.M. employees.

So those participants got only the “values,” or religious instruction.

KARLAN: For another quarter of the villages, just the I.C.M. employees went and the pastor never showed up.

CHOI: In those villages, people were receiving just a secular curriculum and did not receive a Christian curriculum.

In these cases, the program was not held in a church, just to make sure the religious component was totally removed.

KARLAN: And then a quarter of the villagers, there’s nothing. They’re left as is.

CHOI: So that was the control group.

Okay, so those were the four conditions from a set of villages that had been chosen randomly, with each condition including hundreds of households. Pretty impressive for a real-world R.C.T.! Six month later, the economists went back to measure the results. Now, how do you do that?

CHOI: Yeah, so we wanted the study to be about the effect of religiosity on economic outcomes.

KARLAN: We ended up working with 6,000 households.

CHOI: So in order to identify the effect of religiosity, we were comparing those who got values, health, and livelihoods against those who got just health and livelihoods. And then we also compared those who got just values against those who got nothing.

This would allow them to isolate the economic and others effects of the religious instruction. But first, they needed to know whether the religious instruction increased religiosity.

CHOI: Our study would go nowhere if the religious curriculum didn’t actually change the religiosity of the individuals attending these classes.

They surveyed people to see if the program made them more likely to read the Bible, pray, or attend religious services.

CHOI: And we found that it did.

KARLAN: So we found big increases in religious behavior.

CHOI: So then we can go to the second stage, which is, given that the religious programs increased religiosity, what does the effect downstream on other, economic outcomes seem to be?

They looked at everything from food security to life satisfaction to, of course, income. Because the whole purpose of this project — the whole purpose of the I.C.M. charity — was to alleviate poverty. So what was the biggest “downstream effect,” as they call it, of just the religious instruction?

CHOI: What we found was that just being exposed to the religious curriculum increased income by 9 percent, relative to the control group.

KARLAN: And that’s actually pretty noticeable. That’s food. That’s food on the table, and this is a household that has children going to bed hungry.

So that’s pretty interesting: a 9 percent increase in household income that seems to be caused by religiosity. Okay, so that’s the what, but what’s the why? In this kind of research, the what is usually far easier to answer than the why. But why do we think religiosity might drive income? Dean Karlan, James Choi, and David Sutherland each have their own ideas — which, to my ear at least, seem to reflect their own perspectives on religion. First, we’ll hear from Sutherland, the man behind this religious charity:

SUTHERLAND: Those people live such depressing, fatalistic lives that they don’t take advantage of opportunities that are available to them. If we can inject hope into those people’s lives, then life can change. And we think that that happens by the secular things that we do but we also teach them that God loves them and God cares for them, and that aspect of reorienting your whole life around the love of your Creator and therefore the love of people around you — I think reorients their whole life, and it changes their approach to how they decide what they’re going to do the next day.

And James Choi, the unabashedly religious economist:

CHOI: I think that it really probably has to do with the fact that they’re told that they have worth in God’s eyes and their suffering has meaning, and therefore they can continue on, and they can pick themselves up after they experience setbacks. And that’s tremendously encouraging, and it allows them to engage in more productive economic behavior.

And finally, the agnostic, Dean Karlan:

KARLAN: I am very interested in understanding more about issues on hope and aspiration. And drive and ambition, and what is it that makes it so that some ultra-poor households later are doing better, and others are not. And some of that is bad luck. But some of that is about taking opportunities, and seizing them, and running with them.

Karlan and Choi did turn up some data that addresses the why question, to understand why religiosity might lead to higher income.

CHOI: Yes, I think that there were two potential channels that stood out.

KARLAN: One is that we see optimism increase.

CHOI: And second, we found that their grit increased.

KARLAN: Grit is a direct measure of work ethic. Do you always finish tasks? And this is exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the Protestant work ethic.

Ah, the old Protestant work ethic! That idea has been around for a long time. What is it, exactly? Where’d it come from? And how strong is the evidence that it’s real?

Jorg SPENKUCH: So how can we attribute this difference in prosperity to religion rather than some other perhaps unmeasured factor?

*     *     *

The randomized controlled trial of a missionary project in the Philippines found that very poor people earned more money as a result of receiving religious instruction. Why? The researchers suspect there were two primary drivers: optimism and grit.

KARLAN: And this is exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the Protestant work ethic.

The idea goes back to the early 20th century, when the pioneering social scientist Max Weber wrote a long essay called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

SPENKUCH: And this was one of the most influential theses in the social sciences, but also one of the most controversial ones.

That’s Jorg Spenkuch.

SPENKUCH: And I’m an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Spenkuch, like Weber, was born and raised in Germany.

SPENKUCH: I would describe myself as agnostic, though I did grow up in a Catholic household. My parents go to church regularly.

As a grad student in the U.S., Spenkuch got interested in Weber’s famous theory.

SPENKUCH: Basically he argued that the Protestant doctrine of self-determination would make people work harder. My question was whether Weber was right, whether there is a causal effect of Protestantism.

To answer this question, we need to go back to 16th-century Germany. A young Catholic priest named Martin Luther had grown disgusted by many Church practices, especially the sale of indulgences — that is, the forgiving of sins in exchange for large donations.

SPENKUCH: And initially he wanted to reform the church from within. But when he met resistance and was persecuted by Church authorities, he decided to break off. And at the time the printing press had just been invented. So he essentially launched what we would call today a large-scale media campaign.

Luther also launched what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. It would play out all across Europe, for decades, with brutal wars between reformers and Church loyalists, with millions of deaths. On the religious front, meanwhile:

SPENKUCH: His teachings became what’s now the Lutheran faith.

Luther’s teachings departed from Catholicism in several important ways, including a new conception of work.

Tim KELLER: So the medieval church, Catholicism, said, “If you really want to be religious and really please God, you need to go into the monastery.”

That’s Tim Keller, a theologian and founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.

KELLER: The Reformation changed that completely. Martin Luther comes along and says, “Look at all the places in the Bible where it says that God feeds every living thing.” He says, “Well, how is God feeding every living thing? Is food just appearing on their table? No.” He says, “Obviously, God is feeding every living thing through human labor.” So even the humblest farmer’s daughter who is milking a cow is actually doing God’s work, and therefore he said, “All work is a calling. All work is doing God’s work.”

And so it came to be that centuries later, Max Weber would argue that Protestantism helped fuel the rise of capitalism, in part by reframing secular work as a religious expression. Weber also argued that discipline played a strong role: that Protestantism tried to instill the discipline of the Catholic clergy into the Protestant laity. Keller again:

KELLER: Catholicism basically said the religious orders — the monks and the nuns — they had to live a very disciplined life. But the hoi polloi, the masses can be out there and doing what they want to do. Protestants came along and put a lot of emphasis on: all Christians have got to live virtuous, disciplined lives. All Christians. And that created a basis for thrift and self-control.

That’s the theory, at least. There was also the influence of the French theologian John Calvin.

SPENKUCH: Calvin was another reformer. I think of Calvin as Luther on steroids.

KELLER: Where Calvin added his own wrinkle was the idea that your salvation is strictly by grace, without any contribution on your part.

CHOI: If salvation is by grace then how do you know that you are actually saved?

James Choi again.

CHOI: It’s in that sense, people are predestined to either be saved or not.

Max Weber had a very particularly belief about Calvinist doctrine. He believed that the doctrine of predestination meant …

KELLER: The doctrine of predestination meant that all Calvinists were radically insecure, and that they desperately wanted to prove to themselves that they were saved. But they didn’t have any way of proving that. So how can I be sure I’m predestined? And he said the anxiety of that lack of assurance was channeled into hard work.

Max Weber’s thesis — especially the “insecure Calvinist” angle — was not universally accepted. Jorg Spenkuch again:

SPENKUCH: There are all kinds of people saying this is B.S. It wasn’t just limited to Catholics.

And: Keller.

KELLER: Yeah. I am a Calvinist — I’m a Presbyterian. And all of us — I mean, every Calvinist I know has always laughed at that.

But what about the broader thesis: that Protestantism encouraged a work ethic that drove capitalism and leads to better economic outcomes? Some scholars have attacked Weber’s thesis on empirical grounds. For instance: the very Catholic northern Italy saw the inklings of capitalist enterprise well before the Protestant Reformation. And while it’s true that, even today, Protestant countries tend to be more prosperous than Catholic ones, there’s the old correlation-does-not-mean-causality problem:

SPENKUCH: Yes, the Netherlands and Great Britain are more Protestant than say Spain or Italy, but they also speak different languages, they have different cultures apart from religion, and there many other things that vary. So how can we attribute this difference in prosperity to religion rather than some other perhaps unmeasured factor?

That was exactly the question that Jorg Spenkuch wanted to answer:

SPENKUCH: Whether there is a causal effect of Protestantism.

But if you think about how hard it was for Dean Karlan and James Choi to learn whether religious instruction helped Filipino villagers earn more money, how was Spenkuch supposed to learn whether a 500-year-old religious transformation had an economic impact that could still be felt today? Well, it started with a simple idea. Remember, the Protestant Reformation triggered wars throughout Europe. Germany, at the time, was made up of more than 1,000 independent territories, each ruled by its own lord or prince.

SPENKUCH: And what settled these wars was the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. And that peace treaty gave local rulers and lords the right to determine the religion of their territory and therefore the religion of all people who lived on that territory. And you have to realize that these were times of indentured servitude. So if my lord converted to Protestantism, that meant I also converted to Protestantism.

And if your lord stayed Catholic, so did you. But if a Catholic family lived in a territory where the local prince chose Protestantism, they could freely migrate to a Catholic area, and vice versa. This created throughout Germany a checkerboard of Protestant and Catholic micro-populations. And Jorg Spenkuch noticed something.

SPENKUCH: What I noticed was that if you overlay a map from 1555 with a map from modern-day Germany and compare the geographic distribution of Protestants and Catholics, they almost match exactly. Meaning that whichever way a prince decided in the aftermath of the Peace has a huge impact on how many Protestants live in the same area today.

Spenkuch realized he could exploit this demographic accident of history.

SPENKUCH: So I used that to determine the effect of Protestantism on modern-day economic outcomes.

Modern Germany is about one-third Protestant, one-third Catholic, and one-third non-religious. The Protestant and Catholic populations, beyond religion itself, are quite similar. And Germany being Germany, there was a lot of data available for Spenkuch to drill down further.

SPENKUCH: So we can do better than just looking at are Protestants richer than Catholics. We can ask: are they more educated than Catholics? Or do they work longer hours than Catholics? Do they want to work longer hours than Catholics? Etc.

With these data in hand, Spenkuch could now control for any differences beyond religious affiliation. Which let him compare apples to apples — or, really, to compare observationally equivalent modern German Protestants and German Catholics to see who earns more money, and perhaps why. So what did he find?

SPENKUCH: I find three things. One: yes, Protestantism increases labor income in modern-day Germany. Two: Protestants work longer hours than Catholics. And three: they don’t earn higher wages. Meaning yes, Protestants are a little bit more prosperous but because they work more.

In other words, the Protestant work ethic does seem to be real. So, again, that’s the what; as for the why?

SPENKUCH: So this is where the data gets very thin. So what I do find in the data that when you ask people, “How many hours a week would you want to work, conditional on your income adjusting accordingly?” Protestants would want to work longer hours. But what drives these differences? Sort of if you dig a layer deeper, I don’t know.

Some have argued that institutional differences between Protestantism and Catholicism may trickle down to the individual level.

KELLER: The Catholic Church is very, very hierarchical and top-down.

The theologian Tim Keller again.

KELLER: Protestantism is very entrepreneurial, you start your own denomination, and you get things started.

CHOI: Horizontally organized religions like Protestantism are argued to be more friendly towards the building of social capital.

The economist James Choi.

CHOI: And indeed, what you do find as you look across countries and even within regions, is that Protestants are more trusting than Catholics are.

Another idea comes from the fact that Protestantism has historically encouraged its adherents to regularly read scripture.

CHOI: There’s an interesting theory that it was the literacy that was promoted by Protestantism that really led to this economic success.

Indeed, one study that controlled for the literacy rate in Catholic and Protestant countries found no difference in their economic success. In any case, Jorg Spenkuch’s evidence for the Protestant work ethic, at least in the context of modern Germany, is pretty persuasive. We should say, this is not necessarily an economic argument for conversion. Reverend Keller again:

KELLER: If a person is Catholic living in America today and becomes a Protestant, does that mean that person is going to make more money and work harder? I doubt it.

And several downsides of Protestantism have been measured. One recent study found that Protestants in 19th-century Germany were substantially more likely than Catholics to die by suicide. Jorg Spenkuch recently published a paper about another troubling association with Protestantism in Germany.

SPENKUCH: The 10-second summary is that religion is the single-most important determinant of Nazi vote shares at the end of the Weimar Republic. Protestants at the time were two-to-four times as likely as equivalent Catholics to vote for the Nazi party. Now why was that? In the paper, we argued that that’s due to the Catholic Church’s influence over parishioners.

It’s worth noting that what Spenkuch observed about incomes in Germany being driven by working more hours, does not seem to account for the income gains that Dean Karlan and James Choi observed in the Philippines:

KARLAN: We don’t see an increase in the number of hours that people work, but we do see important changes in what they’re doing.

CHOI: They seem to shift away from agricultural work towards other kinds of work, which may be more high-paying, so that may be just the accounting channel through which their income is increasing.

There are, of course, a lot of differences between the Germans that Spenkuch studied and the Filipinos that Choi and Karlan studied — especially the fact that the Filipinos were punishingly poor and perhaps had quicker gains to make by trying a different kind of work than what they’d been doing. It’s also possible they were already working about as many hours as humanly possible. David Sutherland, the ex-Morgan Stanley C.F.O. who runs the Philippines charity, thinks the religious instruction works for a very basic reason.

SUTHERLAND: I think reorients their whole life, and it changes their approach to how they decide what they’re going to do the next day.

As devout as Sutherland is personally, he’s not sure the Protestant Work Ethic is really the key.

SUTHERLAND: Hey, I’m a true believer, right? So for sure, I would like to say that the Protestant relationship with God is a unique differentiator. Now, could someone with a Buddhist background or a Hindu background or a Muslim background that engaged with God the way they understood it, and if that really injected hope in their life, that clearly would have an important change for them. But whether it’s the same as the Protestant, that’s really hard for me to say. I don’t know. I think that additional study would be needed to know whether that’s true.

This is something that everyone we’ve spoken with today has in common. It may be useful to have learned a few things about the relationship between religion and income, there is much, much more that isn’t yet known.

KARLAN: At the end the day, we have not answered the question of what is the impact of religion. No one study is ever going to do that.

CHOI: We don’t have the data to answer that definitively. So basically, we’re left to speculate.

SPENKUCH: I wish I knew the answer.

So, for the many of you listening today who are entering the season of a religious holiday — and for those who aren’t — here’s to questions asked, questions answered, and even those that remain unanswerable. It’s nice to live in a world that’s still got a little mystery, don’t you think?

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky, with help from Stephanie Tam and Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, and Alvin Melathe. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

James Choi, finance professor at Yale University.

Dean Karlan, economist at Northwestern University and president of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Tim Keller, pastor and theologian at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

Jorg Spenkuch, associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

David Sutherland, chairman of the board at International Care Ministries.

RESOURCES

“Randomizing Religion: The Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes,” Gharad Bryan, James J. Choi, Dean Karlan (2018).

More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan (Dutton Press 2011).

“Religion and Work: Micro Evidence from Contemporary Germany,” Jorg Spenkuch (2016).

“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Max Weber (Penguin Classics 2002).

EXTRAS

“Does Religion Make You Happy?,” Freakonomics Radio (2014).

“Are the Rich Really Less Generous Than the Poor?,” Freakonomics Radio (2017).

The post Is the Protestant Work Ethic Real? (Ep. 360) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/religiosity/

[everettwilkinson]

HOUSE TAX VOTE TODAY … TRUMP to the Hill, where he’ll see the GLORY of HC-5 — RON JOHNSON comes out against GOP tax plan — HANNITY: Let the people of Ala. decide on Moore — CORNYN, MURPHY make gun database deal

Good Thursday morning. BIG DAY — HOUSE REPUBLICANS have their tax bill on the floor. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP heads to HC-5 — their Capitol basement meeting room — to hold a rally, of sorts, for the House tax bill. He’s scheduled to talk around 11:30 a.m. SPOILER ALERT: the House will pass their bill quite easily. Democrats won’t vote for it. The ease with which this is getting through has surprised some House Republicans. We don’t expect Trump to appear publicly with any lawmakers at the Capitol, though. OUR QUESTION: Will Trump have Republicans to the White House to celebrate like he did with the health care bill before it exploded in the Senate? … Rachael Bade and Heather Caygle with more on the state of play in the House http://politi.co/2juEqXW

— FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH: This is a big internal victory for Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Rep. Patrick McHenry, the chief deputy whip, and Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady. But it’s just the first step. Reconciling this bill with whatever comes out of the Senate will be another tricky test.

Story Continued Below

**SUBSCRIBE to Playbook: http://politi.co/2lQswbh

BUT … IN THE SENATE

— “Republican Sen. Ron Johnson Opposes GOP Senate Tax Package,” by WSJ’s Siobhan Hughes: “Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said he opposes the Senate Republican tax package, becoming the first GOP voice of dissent that, if it gains momentum, could force significant changes or jeopardize the party’s goal to pass the bill before the end of the year. ‘If they can pass it without me, let them,’ Mr. Johnson said in an interview Wednesday, adding that the plan unfairly benefits corporations more than other types of businesses. ‘I’m not going to vote for this tax package.’” http://on.wsj.com/2zGwOIj

— GOP SENATORS TO WATCH … John McCain of Arizona, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Bob Corker of Tennessee

THE BACKSTORY — “How Cotton brought Obamacare repeal back from the dead,” by Seung Min Kim and Jen Haberkorn: “Sen. Tom Cotton was about to enter the White House early this month to discuss immigration policy when he got an unexpected call from President Donald Trump to talk about a different topic. For days, the Arkansas senator had been working behind the scenes to persuade Republicans that reigniting a battle over repealing Obamacare in the tax fight wasn’t as crazy as it seemed. But Trump, still smarting from GOP’s failures to dismantle the law whom Cotton had first pitched on the idea four days prior, needed little persuading.

“‘I am with you 1,000 percent on this,’ Trump told Cotton over the phone. Trump tweeted twice that Republicans should repeal the mandate, putting pressure on the GOP to tuck it into tax reform despite widespread dismissiveness the idea was greeted by at the time. That Nov. 2 conversation illustrated how the GOP rank-and-file methodically coaxed their leadership to embark on what seemed – and could still become – a fool’s errand to try again to take down Obamacare. In a surprise move, Senate Republicans said Tuesday that they would repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate in their tax plan, using the savings to plow into more tax cuts.” http://politi.co/2AJTeFq

THE BIG QUESTION… HOW LONG CAN THIS LAST? — “Conservative outside groups hold fire on tax bill ahead of first vote,” by Nancy Cook: “As Congress rushes to pass the biggest tax reform legislation in three decades, high-powered business and conservative groups are holding fire on provisions they don’t like in order to avoid derailing the vote. The kumbaya attitude emanates in large part from a sense of desperation among Republicans who believe the party needs to show voters and donors a concrete victory ahead of the 2018 midterms or risk losing control of one or both chambers of Congress, say strategists and conservative activists. ‘It is kind of unreal,’ said one Republican lobbyist. ‘People know this is a freight train coming, and they are doing everything they can to get their stuff on it rather than stand in front of it.’” http://politi.co/2jvctiO

IVANKA SPEAKS — “Ivanka Trump says child tax credit ‘not a pet project’,” by AP’s Catherine Lucey: “Trump says she and husband Jared Kushner, a fellow White House adviser, have no plans to return to their old New York City life any time soon. ‘It’s definitely not short-term,’ Trump said.” http://bit.ly/2A2qfR3

— LOOKING TO 2018: “Tax reform may doom Trump infrastructure plan,” by Colin Wilhelm: “The tax reform bill set to be voted on Thursday by the House of Representatives could kill any chance of the Trump administration’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan ever happening. At best, House support for the plan would signal lukewarm backing among Republicans for President Donald Trump’s ambitions. At worst, the bill would effectively end the funding structure that the administration touts as a way to reach its $1 trillion target and minimize the burden on taxpayers. The House bill ends tax breaks for private activity bonds, a key part of public-private partnerships in projects ranging from roads to low-income housing. The administration has said it wants to leverage those partnerships to reduce the direct cost of the president’s building plan.” For Pros http://politico.pro/2hwszo8

COMING ATTRACTIONS … THE END OF THE YEAR FIGHT — “Republicans stall budget talks for tax reform,” by Rachael Bade and John Bresnahan: “Hill Republican leaders are slow-walking negotiations for a year-end budget deal with Democrats, adamant that tax reform must come first – even if the spending battle drags out until year’s end. Top aides to the ‘Big Four’ – Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – have been engaged in tightly held discussions for weeks, but they remain unable to reach an agreement on a ‘topline’ number for government funding bills for the next year.

“Democrats insist on ‘parity’ in any spending deal; they won’t agree to raise strict budget caps for defense spending without an equal boost to domestic funding. Republicans, so far, refuse to cave on the issue. Pelosi accused Republican leaders of dragging their heels on the matter, suggesting they were trying to push a $5 trillion-plus tax cut package through Congress before they reach a spending agreement, multiple sources said.

“Pelosi also told her colleagues on Wednesday that she won’t sign off on any funding bill that doesn’t increase both domestic and Pentagon funding by the same amount. The California Democrat said she and Schumer have both rejected the latest GOP positions during the leadership-only discussions.” http://politi.co/2z758wR

****** A message from Chevron: Advanced technology is helping us find safer ways to deliver energy. We’re piloting a program that uses drones to monitor tanks and pipelines. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2zydcU4 ******

QUOTE OF THE DAY — CORRY BLISS, executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, to Elena Schneider: “There are certainly incumbent members out there who need to work harder and raise more money if they want to win. They’re fundamentally not prepared for how they’re about to be attacked.” http://politi.co/2iZg7xb

2020 WATCH — SPOTTED last night at the Fringetree restaurant at the Westin: Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Martin O’Malley and Pete Buttigieg.

SIREN — “Hope Hicks may hold the keys to Mueller’s Russia puzzle,” by Darren Samuelsohn: “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is preparing to interview the woman who’s seen it all: Hope Hicks. She’s been part of Donald Trump’s inner circle for years, first at Trump Tower and then as an omnipresent gatekeeper and fixer who could get emails or other communications directly to the boss during the 2016 campaign. As a senior White House adviser and now as communications director, she’s been in the room for moments critical to Mueller’s probe, which has grown to include the president’s response to the Russia investigation itself.

“Hicks’ history with Trump makes her one of the more useful witnesses for Mueller as he looks for insights into the president’s habits and moods. She also is one of the few people well positioned to recount the president’s reactions at various moments as the Russia scandal has sidetracked his presidency – including the Mueller appointment itself. Mueller’s decision to request an interview with Hicks – who hasn’t been named in any criminal wrongdoing – also indicates he’s reached a critical point in the overall investigation, according to former prosecutors and veterans of past White House investigations. Typically, conversations with such senior level aides are saved for near the end of a probe.” http://politi.co/2mwKekL

TRUMP INC. — “Taxpayers pay legal bill to protect Trump business profits,” by USA Today’s Nick Penzenstadler: “Taxpayers are footing the legal bill for at least 10 Justice Department lawyers and paralegals to work on lawsuits related to President Trump’s private businesses. Neither the White House nor the Justice Department will say how much it is costing taxpayers, but federal payroll records show the salaries of the government lawyers assigned to the cases range from about $133,000 to $185,000. The government legal team is defending President Trump in four lawsuits stemming from his unusual decision not to divest himself from hundreds of his companies that are entangled with customers that include foreign governments and officials.” https://usat.ly/2jv0TnG

S.O.S. … THE LATEST ON MOORE — “GOP leaders weigh drastic plan to save Alabama Senate seat,” by Alex Isenstadt and Eliana Johnson: “Republican leaders are exploring a dramatic remedy to salvage the Alabama Senate seat as fresh polling shows Roy Moore’s prospects fading fast. With less than four weeks until the special election and no sign that the party’s besieged nominee will exit the race, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his top advisers are discussing the legal feasibility of asking appointed Sen. Luther Strange to resign from his seat in order to trigger a new special election. McConnell aides express caution, saying they’re uncertain whether such a move, one of several options being discussed, is even possible. …

“New GOP polling obtained by POLITICO suggests that Moore is cratering. A survey conducted by the [NRSC] after allegations emerged that Moore had engaged in sexual misconduct with teenagers showed him trailing Democratic candidate Doug Jones by 12 points. Other recent polling has the race closer.” http://politi.co/2iZeWxM

M.I.A. — Republicans expected Trump to address the Moore situation Wednesday, hoping he would exert some pressure on the Alabama Republican to drop out of the race. So far, he’s stayed mum.

— IS HANNITY CHANNELING TRUMP’S THINKING? … @seanhannity at 11:12 p.m.: “I lived in Alabama-love the people. THEY will sort through the issues before them and decide. Not DC, McConnell, or Commentators, THE PEOPLE!”

DOWN BALLOT IMPACT — “Republican Governors Seek to Avoid 2018 Damage From Trump, Moore,” by Bloomberg’s John McCormick: “Republican governors and their donors — still reeling from GOP losses last week in New Jersey and Virginia — are trying to distance themselves from their party’s problems and plot a 2018 strategy to protect their state-level dominance. At the annual Republican Governors Association meeting in Austin, Texas, party officeholders downplayed those defeats and dismissed the political fallout of President Donald Trump’s historically low approval ratings and lack of legislative accomplishments. They brushed aside questions about the potential long-term consequences from growing sexual misconduct allegations that have engulfed Republican U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore in Alabama. …

“Thirty-six states will hold gubernatorial elections in 2018, with 26 of those now controlled by Republicans. In those races, which often have trickle-down effects on legislative and local elections, Republican candidates will have to decide just how closely to embrace Trump and distance themselves from an unpopular Washington.” https://bloom.bg/2ATPv9i

DRIP DRIP — “Two more women describe unwanted overtures by Roy Moore at Alabama mall,” by WaPo’s Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites: “Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior working in the men’s department of Sears at the Gadsden Mall when a man approached her and introduced himself as Roy Moore. … His overtures caused one store manager to tell new hires to ‘watch out for this guy,’ another young woman to complain to her supervisor and Richardson to eventually hide from him when he came in Sears, the women say. Richardson says Moore — now a candidate for U.S. Senate — asked her where she went to school, and then for her phone number, which she says she declined to give …

“A few days later, she says, she was in trigonometry class at Gadsden High when she was summoned to the principal’s office over the intercom in her classroom. She had a phone call. ‘I said “Hello?”’ Richardson recalls. ‘And the male on the other line said, “Gena, this is Roy Moore.” I was like, “What?!” He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m in trig class.”’

“Richardson says Moore asked her out again on the call. A few days later, after he asked her out at Sears, she relented and agreed, feeling both nervous and flattered. They met that night at a movie theater in the mall after she got off work, a date that ended with Moore driving her to her car in a dark parking lot behind Sears and giving her what she called an unwanted, ‘forceful’ kiss that left her scared. … Moore’s campaign did not directly address the new allegations. In a statement, a campaign spokesman cast the growing number of allegations against Moore as politically motivated. ‘If you are a liberal and hate Judge Moore, apparently he groped you,’ the statement said. ‘If you are a conservative and love Judge Moore, you know these allegations are a political farce.’” http://wapo.st/2jtXgyn

— AND MORE …. “New Roy Moore accuser: ‘He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it,’” by Anna Claire Vollers in AL.com: “A Gadsden woman says Roy Moore groped her while she was in his law office on legal business with her mother in 1991. Moore was married at that time. … According to [Tina] Johnson, he asked questions about her young daughters, including what color eyes they had and if they were as pretty as she was. She said that made her feel uncomfortable, too. Once [legal] papers were signed, she and her mother got up to leave. After her mother walked through the door first, she said, Moore came up behind her. It was at that point, she recalled, he grabbed her buttocks. ‘He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it,’ said Johnson. She was so surprised she didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell her mother. …

“In 1982, Kelly Harrison Thorp was working as a hostess at the Red Lobster restaurant in Gadsden. She was 17 years old and a high school senior. One day Roy Moore came into the restaurant, and she recognized him. … Thorp said Moore asked her if she’d go out with him sometime. ‘I just kind of said, “Do you know how old I am?”’ she recalled.‘And he said, “Yeah. I go out with girls your age all the time.”’ http://bit.ly/2AMW7oV

— @MooreSenate: “An Open Letter to @seanhannity” http://bit.ly/2yL0sZ2 … @VaughnHillyard: “New–> The Alabama GOP is maintaining its support for Roy Moore. In its steering committee meeting tonight, the prospect of removing Moore as the party’s candidate did not reach the point of a vote.”

SHOT — @MooreSenate: “Dear Mitch McConnell, Bring. It. On.”

CHASER — NRSC executive director Chris Hansen (@tankcat) replies: “Bring It On is a movie about high school cheerleaders”.

DEPT. OF ODD BEDFELLOWS — “Senators forge deal to improve gun background database,” by Seung Min Kim: “A bipartisan group of senators has struck a deal to bolster a federal database used to check the backgrounds of gun buyers in the aftermath of several recent mass shootings. The new legislative push is led by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), two powerful figures in their respective parties when it comes to gun policy. Though their bill has not been formally released, it targets the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which both senators have said is deeply flawed.

“Their plan is twofold, according to two sources familiar with it: One is to incentivize states to send more information about criminal histories to the system, known as NICS. States usually aren’t required to do so, unless their own laws mandate it or they have to do so to receive federal funding. It would also make sure that federal agencies follow through on their own requirement that they send information to the database. The new plan would beef up the federal mandate and include punishments for agencies that don’t comply, according to one of the sources.” http://politi.co/2hyYJit

CLINTON WORLD — “‘What About Bill?’ Sexual Misconduct Debate Revives Questions About Clinton,” by NYT’s Peter Baker: “The cultural conversation about women, power and sexual misconduct that has consumed the United States in recent weeks has now raised a question that is eagerly promoted by those on the political right just as it discomfits those on the political left: What about Bill? While Fox News and other conservative outlets revive years-old charges against Mr. Clinton to accuse Mr. Moore’s critics of hypocrisy, some liberals say it may be time to rethink their defense of the 42nd president. Matthew Yglesias … wrote on Vox.com on Wednesday that ‘I think we got it wrong’ by defending Mr. Clinton in the 1990s and that he should have resigned. Chris Hayes, the liberal MSNBC host, said on Twitter that ‘Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.’” http://nyti.ms/2hDQ2r5

— “Clinton hits back at possibility of Uranium One special counsel,” by Brent D. Griffiths: “Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has slammed President Donald Trump for suggesting that a special prosecutor investigate her role in the Uranium One deal, a current cause célèbre among conservative commentators and some House Republican lawmakers. ‘Taking myself out of it, this is such an abuse of power and it goes right at the rule of law,’ Clinton told Mother Jones in an interview posted Wednesday night. ‘As secretary of state, I went around the world bragging about America’s rule of law. … If they send a signal that we are going to be like some dictatorship, some authoritarian regime where political opponents are going to be unfairly, fraudulently investigated, that rips at the fabric of the contract that we have that we can trust our justice system.’” http://politi.co/2ALzTnj

WHO MIGHT REPLACE CORDRAY — per Lorraine Woellert, Zach Warmbrodt, and Daniel Strauss: “Republicans are floating a handful of agency critics as contenders for the post, including Cordray’s biggest foe, House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas. … Keith Noreika, the outgoing acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has also been mentioned, along with Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University. Both have fiercely opposed the bureau’s approach to regulation and enforcement and would face long odds of being confirmed, but could serve as interim directors without Senate approval. Brian Brooks, an executive vice president and general counsel at Fannie Mae who worked with Mnuchin at OneWest Bank, and former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum are also mentioned as candidates to lead the bureau.” http://politi.co/2iZP7Or

CLICKER — @WardDPatrick: “President Trump stops his speech to search for water cc: @marcorubio” http://bit.ly/2zOlrM8 … @marcorubio: “Similar, but needs work on his form. Has to be done in one single motion & eyes should never leave the camera. But not bad for his 1st time”.

SPORTS BLINK — “NEW YORK (AP) – Max Scherzer of the Washington Nationals wins third Cy Young Award and second straight in National League.”

PHOTO DU JOUR: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his wife Louise Linton hold up a sheet of new $1 bills, the first currency notes bearing his and U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza’s signatures, on Nov. 17 at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington D.C. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo

MICHAEL GRUNWALD in POLITICO Magazine, “The IRS Is Building a Safe to Hold Trump’s Tax Returns: Departed tax chief John Koskinen explains why even he can’t see Trump’s taxes—and why we should ‘beware the collapse of the IRS’”: “Koskinen doesn’t share those concerns—not because of his faith in Trump, but because of his faith in the IRS staff and the strict rules governing the integrity of its audits and investigations. Koskinen basically believes the IRS and its professional culture are virtually impregnable to political agendas. He hasn’t spoken to Trump or anyone in the White House in 2017, even though he’s known the president since they negotiated the sale of the Commodore Hotel in New York City in 1975. He’s never looked up Trump’s tax returns—legally, he can’t, and neither can any other IRS employee who isn’t working on them—and says the agency not only keeps them in a locked cabinet in a locked room, but is replacing the cabinet with a safe.” http://politi.co/2hDbk8h

SUSAN GLASSER in the New Yorker: “Karl Rove Has Seen the Enemy and He Is Steve Bannon”: “Yet Bannon, clearly, has got under Rove’s skin. Rove ticked off a list of candidates whom he said showed Bannon’s amazing ‘bad judgment’ and constituted what, to his mind, amounts to a parade of horribles: Grimm, that ‘convicted felon’ from New York; the ‘despicable’ Tom Tancredo for governor in Colorado; the ‘hapless’ Danny Tarkanian, a five-time failed candidate running against Senator Dean Heller in Nevada. ‘These are the people he’s backing and thinks can both win and then govern?’ … The Republican war is on, and Rove is quite clear on just who is the enemy. ‘Bannon is a side show,’ Rove replied after one too many questions about the strategist trying to claim his mantle. ‘Trump is the real issue.’” http://bit.ly/2zMAdTD

BUSINESS BURST — Fortune has named Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang its 2017 Fortune Businessperson of the Year. Also on the list — 2: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon … 3. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff … 4. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos … 5. Ulta Beauty CEO Mary Dillon. http://for.tn/2hDiA3U

****** A message from Chevron: Advanced technology is helping us find better and safer ways to deliver energy to America. We’re piloting a program that uses drones, HD imaging, and thermal mapping capabilities to monitor Chevron wells, tanks, and miles of pipeline. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2zydcU4 ******

DESSERT — “Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3 Million, Shattering Auction Highs,” by NYT’s Robin Pogrebin and Scott Reyburn: “After 19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million with fees, shattering the high for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed Picasso’s ‘Women of Algiers,’ which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015. The buyer was not immediately disclosed. There were gasps throughout the sale, as the bids climbed by tens of millions up to $225 million, by fives up to $260 million, and then by twos.” http://nyti.ms/2A2w1Cd

— NYMag art critic Jerry Saltz: “I’m no art historian or any kind of expert in old masters. But I’ve looked at art for almost 50 years and one look at this painting tells me it’s no Leonardo. The painting is absolutely dead. Its surface is inert, varnished, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old. … Why else do I think this is a sham? Experts estimate that there are only 15 to 20 existing da Vinci paintings. Not a single one of them pictures a person straight on like this one.” http://bit.ly/2zJFo8X

MEDIAWATCH — “Koch Brothers Said to Back Time Inc. Deal Talks With Meredith,” by NYT’s Sydney Ember and Andrew Ross Sorkin: “Time Inc. is said to be in talks to sell itself to the Meredith Corporation, in a deal backed by Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers known for supporting conservative causes. Talks between Time Inc., the publisher of Time and People, and Meredith, the publisher of Family Circle and Better Homes and Gardens, fizzled this year. The new round of negotiations, motivated by the surprise entry of the Kochs, could lead to a quick deal, according to people involved in the discussions. The Kochs have tentatively agreed to back Meredith’s offer with an equity injection of more than $500 million.” http://nyti.ms/2hAXB1C

— “Matt Drudge jabs Bannon over Roy Moore, prompting internal Breitbart fury,” by CNN’s Oliver Darcy: “In a tweet, Drudge linked to a Daily Beast story that said Bannon recently had second thoughts about supporting Moore. ‘A lesson on leaving politics to the professionals,’ Drudge wrote. … [S]taffers at Breitbart … were seemingly taken aback by Drudge’s jab. ‘Wow,’ wrote Breitbart White House correspondent Charlie Spiering, linking to Drudge’s tweet in an internal Slack message obtained by CNN. ‘Is that accurate?’ ‘FACTUALLY INACCURATE,’ replied Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington editor. ‘FAKE NEWS. MATT DRUDGE IS PEDDLING FAKE NEWS.’ … ‘Not true. Bannon is not turning on judge moore. Bulls***.'” http://cnnmon.ie/2ildQx2

TRANSITIONS — Adam Kincaid is launching a consulting firm called Cornerstone Solutions. He most recently was special projects director at the RNC and is an NRCC and RGA alum.

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks. How he’s celebrating: “Tonight I’ll be having a quiet dinner at home with my wife and son. Definitely a great bottle of wine and cake are on the menu. Friday night my daughter comes home from college and since my wife’s birthday was Tuesday we’ll all celebrate both birthdays at Rasika. All of this though is merely a precursor to what will be a GREAT birthday present, watching the NFL leading Philadelphia Eagles destroy the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday. FlyEaglesFly.” Read his Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2AKrmRA

BIRTHDAYS: Elizabeth Drew is 82 … Jay Newton-Small, co-founder and CEO of MemoryWell and a Time and Bloomberg alum (hat tip: Ben Chang) … Hannah Hankins, VP of Civic Advisors … Meg Campbell … Lisa Camooso Miller, partner at Reset Public Affairs … USA Today reporter Fredreka Schouten … Jillian Rogers of DOL … Michael Levi, Obama and CFR alum … Carly Coakley of Blue Engine Message & Media (h/t Matt Moon) … Jim Boyle, partner at Boyle Public Affairs … Kevin Herzik … Michelle Nunn, CEO of CARE USA (h/t Jon Haber) … Adrienne Schweer, SVP of Forbes-Tate Partners and an Ash Carter alum … Caroline Emch … Samir Paul … Ashley Dejean of Mother Jones … Heritage’s Ken McIntyre …

… Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is 37 … Melissa Winter, Michelle Obama’s first hire in 2007 who remains her chief of staff in the family office (h/t Katie McCormick Lelyveld, who was Michelle’s second hire) … Michael Smith, executive director at My Brother’s Keeper Alliance … James Joyner … Ron Blackwell … Patrick Ryan is 63 … Dale Pfeifer … Griffith Waller … Shanti Shoji … Jennifer Eileen Giglio … DiAnne Owen Graham … Raul Damas, partner at Brunswick Group … Christopher Kilian Peace is 41 … Paul Rodriguez … Seth Obed … Edelman’s Mike Reuscher … Rachel Cothran … Melody Johnson … Robbi Dickens … Mike Reynard … Marty Ryan … Seth Obed … Paul C. Barton … AARP alum David Pepper … Zerlina Maxwell … Libby Gerds … Jason Perkey (h/ts Teresa Vilmain)

****** A message from Chevron: Advanced technology is helping us find better and safer ways to deliver energy to America. We’re piloting a program that uses drones, HD imaging, and thermal mapping capabilities to monitor Chevron wells, tanks, and miles of pipeline. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2zydcU4 ******

SUBSCRIBE to the Playbook family: POLITICO Playbook http://politi.co/2lQswbh … Playbook Power Briefing http://politi.co/2xuOiqh … New York Playbook http://politi.co/1ON8bqW … Florida Playbook http://politi.co/1OypFe9 … New Jersey Playbook http://politi.co/1HLKltF … Massachusetts Playbook http://politi.co/1Nhtq5v … Illinois Playbook http://politi.co/1N7u5sb … California Playbook http://politi.co/2bLvcPl … London Playbook http://politi.co/2xfDPuK … Brussels Playbook http://politi.co/1FZeLcw … All our political and policy tipsheets http://politi.co/1M75UbX

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[rickhorrow]

Stadiums Are Big Business: new Book Looks At How And Why…And Then Some…

by Tanner SImkins @TannerSimkins

The stadium business has never been bigger, and the debate over who should pay for such things has never been hotter.  With the NGL now in Las Vegas, the Chargers moving to L.A., the Raiders in flux, the Falcons getting a new home, new York trying to figure out what to do with NYCFC and the Islanders the debate has raged on from sea to sea.  This week author Rafi Kohan has a new book out which talks about all these issues as well as the quirks and fin of fandom and so much more. The book is called “The Arena, Inside the Tailgating, Ticket-Scalping, Mascot-Racing, Dubiously Funded, and Possibly Haunted Monuments of American Sport  ” and we caught up with Rafi to talk the stadium game, and some of the other many lessons learned along his journey.  https://www.amazon.com/Arena-tailgating-ticket-scalping-mascot-racing-dubiously-ebook/dp/B01M6XDXK7

With all the stadia you visited, what was the biggest surprise?

One thing I found fascinating was the way in which ticket scalpers in Cleveland were able to create one-time marketplaces surrounding Cavaliers playoff games, seemingly independent of any other factors. I’ll explain what I mean: For game one of the 2015 playoffs—the first postseason game since LeBron James returned to the city, with the promise of a championship—there was decent activity on the online secondary market and a ton of people milling around the arena. The team was even throwing an official pregame party. And yet, the scalpers couldn’t move very many tickets at all. It was brutal. Some started lowering their demands, while others decided to price enforce. Eventually, they were able to move a few tickets, but nothing close to what they had been anticipating.

Game two was a couple days later. There was no pregame party and secondary market activity was shaky, at best. Naturally, the scalpers feared the action would be even worse. But they were wrong. Game two proved to be a bonanza for the sellers on the street, as they unloaded tickets well above what they were moving for online. There are some guys who like to monitor the online market and try to swoop in and vulture cheap tickets from scalpers, and these guys watched in disbelief as upper-level seats sold for hundreds of dollars. Some scalpers ran out of inventory well before tip-off. Why was one game better than the other? These are the mysteries of the street. As one scalper who works around Fenway Park in Boston put it to me, as to why a ticket is worth one thing and not another: “Ice cream has no bones. So what?”

Atlanta is now about to get a new football stadium, how has that changed the public vs private money situation for these new urban centers?

I don’t think it has changed the situation at all, as far as public vs. private funding goes for football stadiums. The Falcons are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, thanks to a hotel-motel tax, and that’s pretty par for the course (with rare exception in the largest media markets). Some cities and teams are trying to get more creative in terms of how they funnel that money to team owners—in this case, because the money is coming from a hotel-motel tax, the argument can be made that it is tourists who are helping to pay for the stadium (but that of course neglects any sort of counterfactual situation, in which the city uses those tax dollars for other purposes). At the end of the day, a subsidy is a subsidy.

What’s interesting about the new Atlanta football stadium, in my opinion, is the extent to which the Falcons team owner Arthur Blank will make genuine investments in the surrounding community. More so than perhaps any other owner, Blank has been making noise about true community development—job training, lowering crime, youth leadership programs, and so on—and has reportedly provided dollars to back it up. We’ll see what happens, but one of my takeaways from spending so much time in and around stadiums in general is that sports teams ought to be better citizens and better neighbors, instead of cynical stadium tenants—especially given how much public money sports owners accept (which is to say nothing of the benefits of tax-free borrowing)—and this is a good place to start.

You talk about everything from urinals to scalping in the book, who are two of your favorite stories?

Since you brought up urinals, one of my favorite stories has to do with the urinal troughs at Wrigley Field. Apparently, male fans view peeing in the troughs as one of the rituals of Wrigley Field, and a kind of rite of passage. My dad took me to pee in a trough, and by God, I’m going to take my son to pee in a trough! And so when Wrigley began its recent renovations, this was one of the areas on which fans were not willing to compromise. They wanted to keep the troughs. In fact, at one game, my seatmate discovered that I had never peed in a trough and he demanded that I accompany him to the restroom immediately. It was a one-of-a-kind bonding experience.

Another favorite story, which is really more of an interaction, came at Fenway Park. I was sitting in the field-side box of former Red Sox president Larry Lucchino the day after a female fan was badly injured when a shattered bat helicoptered into the stands. I believe she was still in the hospital. Before the game, I started chatting with one of the security guards standing on the field. Because fan injuries were a growing concern in baseball, I asked him if he had ever seen anything like that injury before. He responded,  “Yeah, in my other job.” And what was his other job, I wondered? “I work in the ER,” he said.

Los Angeles just got the Olympics, and with it come new stadia already in the mix. Any thoughts on how LA has re-invented itself as a hub of big sports events?

L.A. is one of the few cities that has ever done the Olympics right, at least in terms of not allowing the games to financially ruin the city. (Which is why so many other cities are hesitant to even bid on the games now.) And with L.A.’s existing sports infrastructure and the new venues coming online, it is possible that the city will not have to build any new permanent facilities, which is great in terms of avoiding white elephants. I spent a good amount of time in Salt Lake City, which has probably done the best job, as far as post-Olympics legacy goes. And the lesson there is that legacy planning can’t begin after the games leave, but has to start well before they ever arrive. Beyond initial and even long-term subsidization costs, when necessary, you need to have a plan for every facility. For example, will a venue revert back to what it was before, as was the case in Salt Lake with Rice-Eccles Stadium, home of the University of Utah football program and host of the opening and closing ceremonies? Will it transform into something new, like Maverik Center, which hosted hockey events and is now a multipurpose sports and entertainment venue? Will the public be able to use it and benefit from it, as they are Utah Olympic Park? I hope L.A. is taking all these things into consideration. They certainly have enough time to plan for it.

One potential downside to L.A. as a sports hub, however, is this question: At what point do we reach oversaturation for stadiums? After all, touring bands and other road shows can only play so many venues in the same city. And if the venues start underbidding one another because they become desperate to fill dates—not saying that’s the case; this is a hypothetical—then we’ve reached a lose-lose situation for all the stadium operators.

You also look at lots of colleges.  From a business and event perspective, what are some towns that have done it right with regard to college facilities?

You know, college football stadiums were actually some of the first permanent steel-and-concrete stadiums in the U.S., with Harvard Stadium being the first in 1903. (The stadium was a gift from alumni.) From the beginning, they held a unique place in the American stadiumscape, almost serving as marketing billboards to the country at large for those individual institutions. They represented something. They were stakes in the ground, and they said: this is a place worth attending.

I spent most of my time at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Beaver Stadium, in State College, Pennsylvania. Both are interesting for many different reasons, and one common reason: identity. To this day, these venues stand as metaphors for those universities and their wider communities. They say: this is who we are, and this is what we stand for. (For obvious reasons, some folks in Penn State have been suffering a bit of a crisis of identity in recent years.)

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I think the question we should be asking about college towns is this: Which of these places are able to respect that initial purpose of standing for something, without trampling academic ideals or compromising core values? It’s increasingly difficult to argue anyone is really getting this exactly right, especially with big money running rampant through college football.

If there was a city looking for a boom in development and innovation with regard to fans and the places their teams play, who should we be looking to?

First off, cities should understand that stadiums are not good economic drivers, for a region as a whole. There is broad economic consensus on this point. So any fantasies of building a stadium and having development naturally bloom around it—forget that. Stadiums are not good financial investments. That being said, this question reminds me of something Roger Noll, who is a preeminent stadium economist, said to me, and that is: stadiums can be useful political instruments when included in larger development plans, especially in cities that could use a boost. As he put it, “Having the government commit successfully to a 20-year redevelopment project is a considerable political accomplishment, and including sports will get you 20 to 25 percent of the electorate. It adds to the coalition.”

In other words, stadiums can help a city with targeted redevelopment, if there is a specific area of the city that they are trying to revitalize, for example. This ended up being what Cleveland did with the Gateway District, when they built new homes for both the Cavs and the Indians in the mid-1990s, and part of what made that successful was that the facilities were imagined as participating in a 365-day-a-year district, with interaction with the wider district—the bars and restaurants and what have you. The stadiums were not walled off or encircled by parking lots but corkscrewed into the district. Of course there is more to Cleveland’s downtown revitalization than just sports facilities, but they played a part.

[deniseyallen]

Rob's Rundown: Week of May 22-26, 2017

Senator Portman is leading the effort in the Senate combat the heroin and prescription drug epidemic that is devastating Ohio and our country. This week, Senator Portman focused his efforts on the influx of deadly synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil that are responsible for the spike in overdose deaths around Ohio. On Monday, he delivered a floor speech urging Congress to act on his bipartisan Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, legislation designed to help stop dangerous synthetic drugs like fentanyl from being shipped through our borders to drug traffickers here, and on Thursday, he held a hearing to discuss how the STOP Act will help save lives. Testifying at the hearing were the Newtown Police Chief, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner and others.

For a more in depth look at Senator Portman’s week, please see the following:

Monday, May 22

On Monday, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) returned to the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to act quickly on his bipartisan Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, citing the growing problem of the synthetic heroins fentanyl and carfentanil in Ohio and around the country. Portman gave examples of the devastation these drugs are having in our communities, including putting police officers—and everyone else—who comes into contact with these drugs at risk. With his Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) being implemented by the administration, it is time, Portman says, for Congress to take further action and pass this much-needed legislation that will help stop dangerous synthetic drugs like fentanyl from being shipped through our borders to drug traffickers here in the United States

A transcript of the speech can be found here and you can watch the video here. 

Tuesday, May 23

Portman Statement on the White House Budget Request

Portman issued the following statement on the release of the White House budget proposal:

“As a former White House budget director myself, I know it’s a tough job. You have to balance competing priorities and be respectful of every hard-earned taxpayer dollar.  I believe we must work to balance our budget without raising taxes, and I think we can do that by advancing pro-growth policies like tax and regulatory reform as well as restraining spending.  As we review this budget and make decisions during the appropriations process, we must prioritize efforts to strengthen our national security and help protect the most vulnerable.

“I appreciate the fact that the White House has changed course and will support the work of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. I had a productive conversation with OMB Director Mulvaney recently about the work of the drug czar's office and I’m pleased the White House will support its essential programs to combat drug addiction.  We must continue to support these and other programs, such as CARA and the CURES law, which are aimed at prevention, treatment and recovery services that so many Americans desperately need.

“I was also pleased to see that the budget request proposes an increase in funding for the cleanup work at the former uranium enrichment plant in Portsmouth. This request would ensure there are no layoffs and that cleanup of the site stays on track.

“Having said that, I continue to oppose this budget’s proposed elimination of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.  This bipartisan program helps protect our environment and strengthen Ohio’s economy.  We won the fight to restore full funding for GLRI for this fiscal year, and I will continue to help lead the effort in the Senate to do so again next year – just like I did when President Obama proposed cutting the program.”

Wednesday, May 24

On Fox News & CNBC, Portman Discusses Jobs, Tax Reform, National Security & More

During interviews on Fox News and CNBC, Senator Portman discussed the need to fix our broken tax code to make America more competitive, create more jobs, and increase wages. Portman has been outspoken on the need to reform our tax code to provide relief to Ohio’s workers. Portman also discussed the need to lower health care costs for Ohio families and small business while still protecting Ohio’s Medicaid expansion population, particularly those receiving treatment for heroin and prescription drug abuse. Lastly, Portman discussed President Trump’s trip abroad, the recent attack in Manchester, and the need to reassert America’s role in the world and keep America safe.

Excerpts of the interviews can be found below. The full Fox News & CNBC interviews can be found here and here.

PORTMAN ON FOX NEWS

On the Manchester Attack and POTUS’ Trip Abroad:

“I think the trip in general has been positive. This notion of America’s leadership role having been eroded over the last eight years is real and I think we are seeing through this trip and through some other measures that have been taken, a reassertion of America’s global role. Not as the world’s policeman, but maybe more like the sheriff where you have a posse with you and the posse includes these countries in the Middle East that the president talked about in terms of fighting ISIS. The Gulf State countries. But also in terms of our NATO allies to be sure that we are pushing back in Eastern Europe with Russia, to be sure that we are together in terms of the fight against terrorism. I think in general, that’s been very positive… 

“It’s a three pronged approach. One is the military part we talked about and that is important to go after ISIS and that’s happening now in Syria and also in Iraq. Second, we have to do more in terms of ensuring the people who come to this country are not here to do us harm. There are a lot of foreign fighters who have gone into the fight, more from Europe than from the United States. But many of these European countries have a Visa waiver program with us where it’s easier to come into our country because they are allies because we’re generally not concerned about it. But we have to be more concerned now. About 5,000 of these foreign fighters can go back to European countries and then have relatively easy access to the United States. We do need to tighten up on the Visa waiver programs and ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect the country. 

“Finally, homegrown terrorism. Let’s face it, that is probably the toughest of all. And there I think it’s law enforcement, the FBI, even local law enforcement. But it’s also having better relationships with the Muslim community in this country. That’s what’s been successful in finding some of these terrorist threats. In my own home state of Ohio, we had the first foreign fighter who was arrested on terrorist charges because the Muslim community worked with local police to identify the threat and to be able to stop somebody before he committed an atrocious crime. This is a dangerous world.”

On the Budget and Tax Reform:

“I hope we can get to three percent [growth], but it’s going to require these other pro-growth elements that are not part of the budget, including tax reform significantly. Also doing something on regulations. Smarter regulations is really important. We did mark up a bill last week in Committee, bipartisan, that would do that. Other issues have to be dealt with like the increasing costs of health care and ways in which we can restore some growth in the economy by having better skills training, using the federal dollars much more wisely in that regard. I think that’s the key is to, yes, restrain spending, but also get the economy moving again …

“We have focused on the individual regulations, as you know, about 56 million hours of work have been taken out by better regulations and by savings of over $76 billion to the economy, so that’s already starting to happen. But then broader regulatory reform I think is in the next few months. In the meantime, health care is first, tax reform is second, the reason is we are doing them both under a budget procedure and you have to finish one before you start the other. I do think by the end of this year, this calendar year, I think tax reform is very possible. I think there is more consensus, frankly, around tax reform then there is around health care and I think there is an opportunity for Republicans to come together on a basic pro-growth agenda that has lower taxes, broadening the base of taxation, by getting rid of some of the complexity of the tax code and that’s a time honored wisdom that that’s going to grow the economy. I’m hopeful we can get to the kind of growth numbers they have in their budget.”

PORTMAN ON CNBC

On Tax Reform:

“As you know, I believe [tax reform] ought to be revenue neutral, but it ought to use the dynamic score, meaning a macroeconomic score that assumes that good tax policies actually might change behavior. And it will. It has to be done for two reasons. One is to help people get higher wages because we need growth for that and second is to deal with the debt and deficit because it’s going to require both restraining spending and economic growth.

“Of course there’s kind of the push and the pull. And you know, part of the pull is to assure that you have tax reform that actually does not create a penalty, a steep cliff when you try to go to work. So part of the tax reform effort for folks who are low income is to say, okay, if you take a job, you’re not suddenly going to see both the loss of your benefits and a big tax increase. And there are ways to do that. That’s one of the things we’re working on now on tax reform. On the other side you want to create the opportunity for work and training and that’s why there is a work requirement in some of the welfare programs, in others there are not. I think that’s something that, again, if you look at the president’s budget, I think he assumes there will be some sort of work requirements that the states would be able to put in place should they choose to under the new Medicaid program they’re talking about. So it’s both. But, this gets us, again, to tax reform, where you don’t want to have a tax code that penalizes work. You want to encourage people to go to work and get on the first and second rung of the economic ladder and that’s something I think we can do as part of the overall tax reform effort…”

On Medicaid:

“I think what you do is you reform the program so it works better for the recipients … And what you want to do is give governors like my governor, John Kasich you mentioned, much more flexibility to be able to run a better program so you can cover the same number of people but you can do it in a way that’s much more cost effective, and better for them. So, for instance, more managed care. For instance looking at preventive care. Giving governors the ability to design programs that work for individual groups within Medicaid. And that’s what the House and Senate should be doing in my view. So my big concern, as you know, is that Medicaid right now is the single biggest payer for drug treatment. And at a time of an opioid crisis in this country, this is prescription drugs and heroin and synthetic heroins, we have to be sure we provide for the kind of help people need, rather than pulling out the rug at a critical time. I think we can do that. And I’m working on that with some of my colleagues.”

On Bipartisanship:

“I do think with regard to what Congress comes up with in the end, which will be 12 of, I hope, individual spending bills that there will be a lot of Democrats who will support those. And look on the tax front I think there’s also an opportunity to reach out to Democrats. Let’s face it our code is broken. Everybody knows it. We’ve talked about this on this program in the past, even Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader and I came together about a year and a half ago with regard to the international side because it’s crazy to have $3 trillion locked up overseas. We want to bring that back. Bring it back at a low rate, repatriate it, and invest that here in this country. So I think there’s some aspects where we can find bipartisanship and we just passed a regulatory reform bill out of committee last week that had some bipartisan support that I’ve worked on for several years. So I think you’re going to have to find individual areas where we can find agreement, and push those hard. Because, we do need to figure out a way to come together as a country and solve some of these problems.” 

Thursday, May 25

U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Stopping the Shipment of Synthetic Opioids: Oversight of U.S. Strategy to Combat Illicit Drugs 

Portman, as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired a hearing on Stopping the Shipment of Synthetic Opioids: Oversight of U.S. Strategy to Combat Illicit Drugs. You can watch his opening statement here.

Postal Service IG Testifies that the Postal Service Should Require Advance Electronic Customs Data

Acting Postal Service Inspector General Tammy Whitcomb criticized the Postal Service for failing to request advance customs data on packages entering the United States and for not doing a better job of ensuring the safety and security of inbound international mail.  Here is a sampling of statements from the testimony of the Postal Service Inspector General:

“International postal regulations are beginning to change in recognition of the importance of posts providing advance electronic customs data. 

“The Postal Service can also require this data through bilateral agreements it makes with foreign postal operators. 

“Our audit work found instances of bilateral agreements where the Postal Service had not requested this advance customs data…

“At times, the Postal Service just did not present packages to CBP for inspection when requested. Instead, the packages were processed directly into the mail-stream…

“Ensuring the safety and security of inbound international mail is a critical challenge for the Postal Service and CBP.  More effort is needed to quickly fix problems in the current process and to make sure CBP receives as much electronic customs data as possible.”

Her full prepared testimony can be found here.

Portman: “How Many More Americans Have to Die Before our Government Gets its Act Together”

During the hearing, Portman asked a simple question: “How many more Americans have to die before our government gets its act together?”  More and more Americans are dying every year because of the heroin and opioid epidemic, and now the influx of deadly synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil.  Portman’s Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, supported by Customs and Border Protection, would help provide law enforcement the tools it needs to be able to better detect packages that are coming from countries like China that contain these deadly drugs, and therefore help save lives.

Transcript can be found here and a video can be found here. 

Customs and Border Protection Confirms Advanced Electronic Data Essential to Detecting & Stopping Deadly Drugs

Acting Executive Assistant Commissioner, at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, confirmed to Chairman Portman during the hearing that having the advanced electronic data required in the bipartisan Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act would “unquestionably” help their agency keep deadly synthetic drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil from reaching our communities.

Transcript of the exchange can be found here and a video can be found here.

Ohioans Testify on Devastating Impact of the Drug Epidemic

Newtown, Ohio Police Chief Thomas Synan, Jr. and Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson testified before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) hearing on stopping illicit drugs from being shipped into the United States.  Portman, as PSI Chairman, had the opportunity to ask questions of both witnesses regarding their experiences combating the opioid crisis, the Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, and more.

Excerpts can be found below and video can be found here.

Of Police Chief Synan, Portman asked if the STOP Act’s objective to help create a chokepoint where law enforcement would better be able to detect these drugs coming into our country would help, and he replied:

“Yes, Senator Portman. It would definitely help cutting off that supply. There is very little risk for the dealers right now. There’s quite a lot of reward. The problem with it coming through the mail is that it’s not like in the 80s with the crack, where you had major gangs that were mostly pushing the crack cocaine, and once you identify the gang, you cut the head off the snake, the rest of it collapses. Here it’s everywhere with hundreds of dealers and not necessarily in a network or sourced in one area. So it makes it very difficult for enforcement… Not only is the chokepoint important but we also have to work on the issue of having those people who are addicted get long term care in order to reduce the demand. Once you reduce demand then you’ll reduce supply.”

When asked by Senator Portman what his projections were for the toll of the opioid epidemic in Cuyahoga County in 2017 compared to previous years, Dr. Gilson said:

“The crisis is going to get worse. We’re projecting an increase from 660 total deaths up to close to 800. I think most of that is going to be driven again by fentanyl. … If carfentanil becomes the new fentanyl in 2017 I shudder to think how much worse it can be.”

When asked where these drugs are coming from, Dr. Gilson confirmed to Senator Portman that they were largely coming through the mail system from countries overseas, primarily from China:

“My investigators will sometimes find computer records, packaging that clearly shows that these drugs are coming from overseas. And the concept that a lot of these drugs are coming from China is something that our DEA liaisons completely support. … These are drugs that are coming from overseas, primarily from China, and they are being sold in our country really on a basis that could be considered an act of terrorism.”

Chief Synan’s opening statement can be found here.

Dr. Gilson’s opening statement can be found here.

Portman on Yahoo News: “Russia’s Behavior Should Not Be Rewarded”

During an interview with Katie Couric on Yahoo News, Senator Portman discussed Russia, human trafficking, his bipartisan STOP Act to help address the fentanyl epidemic and more. On Russia, Portman said that we should continue to look for ways to work with them, but also that “Russia’s behavior should not be rewarded.”

Excerpts of the interview are below and the full video can be found here. 

PORTMAN ON RUSSIA

“I do think we should have a constructive relationship with Russia including in fighting terrorism where we should have common ground. But I also think that Russia, in terms of what they’re doing in Ukraine, the eastern border of Ukraine, Crimea, the meddling in the elections, and frankly what they’re doing with Iran in the Middle East and in Syria puts them in a position where they are counter to our national security and we have to acknowledge that. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to talk with them and meet with them. I’m okay with that. We should do that around the world in my view because that’s how you begin to solve these problems. But right now, Russia’s behavior should not be rewarded.”

PORTMAN ON I AM JANE DOE FILM

“This is something that, unfortunately, is affecting communities all over our country. Ohio happens to be a state that’s been hit pretty hard by this. But it’s this idea of people actually selling other people online. It’s called trafficking. Sex trafficking is occurring primarily on one website. It’s called Backpage. And so about a year and a half ago we started an investigation into Backpage to find out how they could get away with this because, frankly, we were getting so many reports that they were selling minors online. Mostly young girls. And sure enough we found out that they not only were they doing it, but they knew they were doing it and covered up evidence of that. And that I think has provided information for prosecutors across the country that I hope will be helpful. We also would like to change one of the laws here in the United States that has to do with the liability if you do engage in that kind of activity—that there should be some liability back to an entity like Backpage that has knowledge of what they are doing.

“So it’s a really important issue because it’s a growing problem because of the internet. In other words, it’s sort of the dark side of the internet, and we talked earlier about the drug issue. Purchasing drugs online is another problem that we have to address. But in this case it is actually increasing the human trafficking problem by making it more efficient, making it easier by doing it online… I Am Jane Doe is an awesome documentary because it chronicles the lives of three or four women and what they went through and their parents and their inability to be able to stop Backpage from selling their kids online.”

PORTMAN ON THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC AND THE STOP ACT

“It’s a vexing problem and it’s growing. Sadly, Katie, the new numbers that we just got today in a hearing are that this year is likely to be far worse than last year in terms of overdoses and deaths, much of it driven by these new synthetic opioids that are coming into our country through the mail system. So our hearing today was about legislation I’ve introduced on a bipartisan basis with Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to try to stop some of this poison from coming into our communities simply by asking the post office to do what the private carriers do, which is provide the data so law enforcement can find these packages. But ultimately, this is going to be solved in our communities, in our hearts, and in our families.” 

from Rob Portman http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/rob-s-rundown?ContentRecord_id=94BDB201-4AB1-46F5-B585-845478EA17AE

[workreveal-blog]

Trump orders Dodd-Frank review to roll back financial regulation.

New Post has been published on https://workreveal.biz/trump-orders-dodd-frank-review-to-roll-back-financial-regulation/

Trump orders Dodd-Frank review to roll back financial regulation.

Money owed

Credit score playing cards, overdrafts, personal loans, mortgages, pupil Money owed, save cards … many adult human beings have racked up a few critical debt. It can be harder to make greater than the minimum payments presently: SunLife located that as a percent of earnings, the ones elderly 45-fifty four have greater than half of their revenues allotted to fixed costs.

“Many people experience substantial money issues in middle age, while stress on finances can regularly come from each guideline within the family tree,” says Jane Tully, a spokeswoman for the cash Advice Accept as true with. “In search of loose Advice is the first step – you can begin to recollect putting apart any surplus profits for those desires.” So Trump orders Dodd-Frank review to roll back financial regulation.

The cost of children By using centre age some the early childcare prices are over – but there’s plenty nonetheless to pay. For people with the kids in private training, average charges in step with the period for boarding are £10,317, while average day expenses according to term are £four,541, in step with the Unbiased Schools Council. Many parents go for a longer mortgage period, and decrease monthly payments, to release some coins for this, says Cox.

As for college, the everyday graduate of an English University, underneath the £nine,000 costs regime, owes an average of around £forty four,000, in step with thinktank the Sutton Believe. And after graduation, and a boomerang again into the circle of relatives home, getting them directly to the belongings ladder is a difficulty. The Halifax issued information showing that the average deposit paid Through a first-time purchaser accelerated By way of thirteen% in 2015 to £32,927.

“One of the pleasant approaches to shopping for college and a deposit is a tax-unfastened Junior Isa,” says Cox. “Try this as early as you can, and to the point, your child is eighteen they can get admission to the budget. However, mother and father ought to only Do this when they have their very own Debts below manipulate and their retirement savings in place.”

Donald Trump moved to roll returned the fiscal rules delivered in after the last economic disaster on Friday, directing an evaluation of the Dodd-Frank Act, which turned into enacted to make certain there might never be another 2008-fashion meltdown.

America president stated his trendy government order turned into valuable because the guidelines were too hard on commercial enterprise and hurting the financial system. However, the circulate changed into largely symbolic – best Congress can rewrite the rules.

A second directive is predicted to halt the implementation of an Obama-era law that could have required brokers to act in a client’s subtle interest while supplying retirement Recommendation, in preference to are seeking the best earnings for themselves

“We desperately need to overtake how we approach monetary law,” said the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. He said Dodd-Frank was a “disastrous coverage” that became “crippling” us financial system.

Financial cost

The Treasury secretary has a hundred and twenty days to talk over with the monetary Balance Oversight Council, set up Via the Dodd-Frank Act to appearance out for excessive risks to America economic device, and document returned on whether or not it became meeting Trump’s “centre principles” for the financial law. Those consist of preventing taxpayer-funded bailouts; fostering financial growth; permitting US groups to be competitive with foreign corporations in the home and overseas markets; and advancing American interests in international economic, regulatory negotiations and conferences.

Opponents of reform immediately accused Trump of caving into Wall Avenue after a campaign pledge to keep banks accountable.

“Donald Trump talked a big sport approximately Wall Street all through his campaign – but as president, we’re finding out whose aspect he’s without a doubt on,” stated Senator Elizabeth Warren, considered one of Trump’s fiercest critics.

“The Wall Avenue bankers and lobbyists whose greed and recklessness almost destroyed this us of a can be toasting each other with champagne. However, the American humans have now not forgotten the 2008 monetary crisis – and they’ll now not neglect what happened today.”

Earlier than signing the order, Trump met with his enterprise advisory panel, which incorporates 18 executives from big US agencies such as GE, Citigroup, Popular Motors, Tesla and Disney.

“We anticipate to be slicing lots out of Dodd-Frank, due to the fact frankly I have such a lot of people, friends of mine, which have high-quality groups and they can borrow money … They simply can’t get any cash due to the fact the banks simply gained allow them to hire due to the rules and norms in Dodd-Frank. So we’ll be speaking approximately that regarding the banking enterprise,” Trump stated.

The president becomes backed By Gary Cohn, director of the countrywide monetary council and a former Goldman Sachs banker. “Individuals are going to have higher selections and Americans are going to have more top merchandise due to the fact we’re no longer going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs each yr,” Cohn said in an interview with the Wall Avenue Magazine.

Cohn, previously the chief operating officer at Goldman, stated the executive order turned into “a table-setter for a gaggle of stuff this is coming”.

At the marketing campaign path, Trump accused Hillary Clinton and his Republican rival Ted Cruz of being “in bed” with Goldman Sachs. He additionally stated hedge funds were “getting away with homicide”.

The Dodd-Frank Act turned into a sweeping, bipartisan plan to overtake the monetary, regulatory machine after the worst disaster for the reason that Great Depression.

Dodd-Frank

The 2010 reform bill aimed to save you the failure of a big bank from triggering a meltdown inside the financial machine because the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 did, putting off a wave of company crises that caused a global recession. The aim became to more carefully display large institutions that are “too huge to fail”, and to restriction the sorts of dangers they can take.

Trump had promised to dismantle Dodd-Frank, claiming it become maintaining returned leading and tying up an enterprise in red tape. Many of the maximum inclined regions of the act are the so-called Volcker rule, first proposed With the aid of Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman.

The guideline seeks to put a firewall between a bank’s customer operations and its unstable buying and selling sports, and to make sure that the financial institution is not making bets in opposition to the pastimes of its clients, as many did By way of making a bet on a housing fall apart while promoting loan-subsidized bonds. Cohn is a critic of the Volcker rule, as is Trump’s Treasury secretary nominee, Steven Mnuchin, some other former Goldman companion.

Some other goal may be the patron financial Safety Bureau, a Dodd-Frank advent at the start proposed Through Senator Warren. The CFPB has proved an effective consumer watchdog and has back over $11bn to the sufferers of payday creditors, loan sharks and people charged excessive overdraft fees due to the fact its advent.

But the dismantling of Dodd-Frank will be met with strong opposition from Democrats, purchasers and activist agencies. Lisa Donner, govt director of lobby group Individuals for Financial Reform, stated: “What they are trying to do is make it simpler for large banks to scouse borrow from human beings.”

Donner said the circulate became “a grand betrayal of what Trump promised on his campaign trail, and that changed into to shield us By way of standing up to Wall Avenue. That’s what the folks that voted for him supported.”

trump

however, Donner said dismantling Dodd-Frank would not be easy. “That is a law that changed into handed By Congress and desires to be changed By using Congress. It may be performed By using fiat.”

The Metropolis of London has warned that the lack of banking jobs to European nations due to Brexit may want to threaten British and Ecu Financial Stability.

Interviews with more than 1/2 a dozen senior bankers and business leaders reveal the developing reality that the risk of dropping single marketplace access will force a wave of relocations this year and might reason an “unwinding” of a cluster of associated organisations.

While the immediate lack of a few thousand jobs is regarded with relative equanimity, the difficulty is mounting over the knock-on effect on economic Stability if the City’s valuable associated professions start to fragment.

Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, said common law needed to be agreed with the last 27 Ecu members as soon as Brexit talks were given below manner or there was a danger of sparking turbulence inside the monetary gadget.

“One of the essential portions is the surroundings that exist, which effectively connects the fund managers to the threat managers to the liquidity providers to the insurance vendors and the Credit providers … it all benefits from all of the other portions being there,” Flint stated. “That gets built up over decades as bits get added to the existing cluster. It’s difficult to know which is the piece that causes people to say, ‘Well, if that’s not there I have to do something else,’ and you get an unwinding of a cluster because things that are connected today are more important than people imagine.”

[freedombeginswithyou]

Saving Organizations

The amount of work that goes into not only building a rescue foundation but then preserving it, is more than one realizes. Yet with shelters at their max capacity and sanctuaries overflowing, the need for more is at an overwhelming high. Especially with the start of a new year, we often see an increase for the good and bad.  The bad being a lot of pets get dumped at shelters due to the harshness of winter or changing of life circumstances.  For example, divorce rates are quite high after the new year, and we know too well how divorce has affected many animals.  Winter is also hard on the senior citizens, often forcing them to give up beloved pets.  

However, the good is often times people start making positive resolutions involving diet and giving back to society.  Becoming vegan is two-fold in helping reaching these goals by not only leading to a healthier lifestyle, but it also saves lives and our plant.  Yet many of us, even with the best of intentions, fail a few weeks into the new year and give up on our goals.  By experience, I’ve learned the best path to success is baby steps.  Resist the urge to “do it all” and instead focus on little changes you can make to end bad habits and start healthier ones.

A great baby step towards leading a vegan lifestyle or simply taking an interest in how the animal industry affects lives and our planet, is to help out an organization.  They are always short of volunteers, and as we’ve mentioned before, a couple hours a month can make a world of difference.  But if you simply don’t have the time or that seems overwhelming, the easiest solution is make a donation.  Yes, you hear that all the time as everyone seems to be asking for your money.  However, we encourage you to choose to give as these organizations are in desperate need if they are to survive.

Trafficking of animals and humans alike is a major problem in this country.  It’s a faux pas topic we have continued to refuse to acknowledge, yet that mindset is starting to change.  More people are speaking out about their own abuse and states are starting to recognize how abuse has gotten out of hand.  In fact, I just heard beauticians and nail technicians are now being required to take training on recognizing the signs of physical abuse.  You are starting to see a shift in our society where we will no longer be silent, no longer pretend this sort of behavior is reserved for poorer, less educated countries.  What will soon follow is our recognition of animal abuse.  It used to be the “cool thing” to be vegetarian or vegan, a fad every teenage girl seemed to try.  But now it’s transitioning into the “right thing” to do.  With celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Joaquin Phoenix, Ellen Page, Miley Cyrus, Woody Harrelson, Morrisey, Sia, and more not just making the choice to live a vegan lifestyle but speaking out loudly and publicly about the wrongness of the animal industry.  We are seeing a change in our nation, slow but steadfast.

It’s time to jump on board.  While the overall process of transformation is not an easy one, taking the first step most definitely is.  Find a shelter or an organization you can donate $5 a month to. That’s less than one venti Starbucks a month.  You may not be ready to jump all the way in and fight on the frontlines but it’s a start in the right direction and an easy resolution you can keep.  

Organizations are struggling.  Every year they have certain requirements to maintain their 501(c)3 status.  By making a monthly donation (which, as a reminder, you can easily set up as a monthly withdrawal so it’s no work for you), you allow founders and employees of these organizations the ability to spend their time not on figuring out how to pay their bills but rather spend every second rescuing another animal in need. That speaks volumes.  

Debby is one of those founders who could use your help.  She founded the Wagner Farm Rescue Fund and Have A Heart Farm.  Her 501(c)3 costs for both of those is around $2,000 a year. With the start of 2017, she’s spending a lot of time trying to gather those funds.  Please consider helping her out, so she can better spend her time finding a placement for an animal whose life is on the line.  She’s also been trying for years to raise money to purchase land to for a farm sanctuary through her organization, Have a Heart Farm. It seems every time she finds a location that may work, she can’t raise the money in time to purchase it. Currently she has her eyes on a 22-acre-land in good condition, with the more costly aspects like well and septic being newer.   The asking price is $139,000.  It’s impossible for one person to come up with that much.  But your contribution will get the ball rolling.  

You can make a donation to Have a Heart Farm here: https://www.justgive.org/basket?acton=donate&ein=20-5508685

Donations to Wagner Farm Rescue Fund, which bears witness for animals exploited by a public funded farm-historic museum, can be made here: https://www.justgive.org/basket?acton=donate&ein=04-3726030  or here: http://www.wagnerfarmrescuefund.org/contributions/

Myth of the Week:  Once they are up and running, sanctuaries are good to go.  The initial phases of opening a sanctuary are so tedious, a rollercoaster of events, it’s easy to see why people assume that once it opens, the fight is over.  But the fight often has just begun.  Animals are unpredictable and so often places are shut down due to facility malfunctions or not being able to keep up with costs.  It’s easy to sit back and let someone else do the work, but this is definitely an area where we can’t have that mentality.  Not everyone is at the point where they want to give up meat or where they can foster animals.  But everyone has a few dollars to spare each month.  Most of these donations are also tax deductible.  Make a New Year’s resolution you can keep this year and one that will change lives.  Give today!

(Photo found at: https://www.google.com/search?q=empty+meadow+with+creek&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiEn43F4KbRAhWh6YMKHdluAlYQsAQIGw&biw=1266&bih=723#tbm=isch&q=meadow+with+creek&imgrc=fHse1cpctPEdAM%3A)