Free Republic

As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally. It is to be expected that students will be immaculately ignorant of the matters they...

General Information The Public Improvement Fee (PIF) is collected and used to finance a portion of the cost of new public improvements at Belmar. www.belmarcolorado.com Public improvements at Belmar include such things as public parking, parks, streets and sidewalks, water, sewer and storm water utilities, public spaces and public art. The City of Lakewood is collecting the PIF on behalf of the Plaza Metropolitan District No. 1 and its Trustee, US Bank. The PIF at Belmar is 2.5% on all sales transactions, as defined in the PIF Covenant. The PIF is a fee and NOT a tax; therefore, it becomes...

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees. Need to replace a lost debit card? Bank of America now charges $5 — or $20 for rush delivery. Deposit money with a mobile phone? At U.S. Bancorp, it is now 50 cents a check. Want cash wired to your account? Starting in December, that will cost $15 for each incoming domestic payment at TD Bank. Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to...

Stryker, the Kalamazoo-based maker of artificial hips and knees, will cut 5% of its global workforce by the end of next year to reduce costs in the face of new fees on device makers required by the U.S. health care law.

Effective November 2, 2011, SunTrust will no longer be charging a check card fee on any consumer checking accounts. If you received notice that your account would be subject to this fee, please disregard it. If you have previously been charged this fee, you will receive a full refund within the next 30 days.

Airlines with a big presence in Chicago say proposed new federal taxes aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit could cost jobs and limit flights to and from smaller markets in Illinois... Airline taxes proposed by the White House and being considered by a Congressional committee include a tax of $100 per take-off for both passenger and cargo flights. A second tax would be on airfares, doubling the current $2.50 passenger security tax to $5 and eventually – by 2017 – to $7.50.

The top lawmakers on the Senate’s defense panel on Friday recommended that a special committee searching for ways to slash the deficit consider some of President Barack Obama’s proposed changes to health and retirement benefits for the military. In separate letters to the bipartisan panel, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., signaled they were open to cost-saving steps in military benefits, recommendations that have already attracted fierce opposition from powerful groups of retired officers and veterans resistant to change.

Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois is telling Americans to "Get the heck out of that bank", right on the Senate Floor. His comments are in response to Bank of America hiking fees on debit cards. Please consider BofA Customers Urged by Lawmakers to Quit Lender Over Debit Fee Congressional Democrats are pushing customers to quit doing business with Bank of America Corp. and one lawmaker is looking to make it easier for them to do so as the biggest U.S. lender announced plans for new debit-card fees. U.S. Representative Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat, introduced a bill today that would...

There are many observations that can be made about President Obama’s remark Monday to ABC News that businesses “don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated.” In and of itself, this comment reveals much about his beliefs and knowledge (or lack thereof) on economics, consumer choice, and the private sector in general. But in the context in which it was made — Bank of America, Citi, and other banks’ recently announced debit-card and checking-account fees for consumers, which they are charging to recoup losses from the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law’s...

Government imposes new price controls on an industry. Industry raises prices elsewhere to make up for the artificial cap on cost recovery. Government expresses shock, shock at the development. For those of us old enough to remember the 1970s, this seems like deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once said. For those either too young or too “dim,” as the Washington Examiner puts it, the surprise should be a learning experience, even for a “dim bulb” like Dick Durbin During the debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, when Democrats controlled Congress, Durbin insisted on including an amendment...

As I detailed here in February in "Dick Durbin Is Stealing Your Free Checking," thanks to price controls on debit card transactions from the Durbin Amendment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank "financial reform" law, free checking is going the way of the dodo bird. The Durbin price controls on interchange fees -- the so-called "swipe fees" that retailers pay to bank and credit unions that process debit card transactions, go into effect this Saturday, October 1, and are already showing more dire effects than originally predicted. Not only is free checking disappearing at a rapid pace -- a new Bankrate.com survey...

Bank of America plans to start charging customers a $5 monthly fee for using their debit card for purchases. The fee will be rolled out starting early next year. [snip]...Anne Pace, a Bank of America Corp. spokeswoman, said Thursday that customers will only be charged the fee if they use their debit cards for purchases in any given month. Customers won't be charged if they only use their cards at an ATM. The fee will apply to basic accounts and will be in addition to any monthly fees customers are already being charged. For example, one of the bank's basic...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's not just millionaires who'd pay more under President Barack Obama's latest plan to combat the deficit. Air travelers, federal workers, military retirees, wealthier Medicare beneficiaries and people taking out new mortgages are among those who would pay more than $130 billion in government revenues raised through new or increased fees. Airline passengers would see their federal security fees double from $5 to $10 for a nonstop round-trip flight and triple to $15 by 2017, raising $25 billion over the coming decade. Federal workers would face an additional 1.2 percentage point deduction from their paychecks to contribute...

WASHINGTON — It's not just millionaires who'd pay more under President Barack Obama's latest plan to combat the deficit. Air travelers, federal workers, military retirees, wealthier Medicare beneficiaries and people taking out new mortgages are among those who would pay more than $130 billion in new government revenues raised through new or increased fees. These fees are advertised as "savings" in administration budget documents.

Parking ticket fines in San Francisco may go up $3 apiece as the perennially cash-strapped Municipal Transportation Agency scrambles to fill a funding gap. That means, for example, the penalty to park at an expired downtown meter would go up to $68 and the fine for parking in a street-cleaning zone would jump to $58. . . . Part of the problem: Fewer tickets are being issued. Another? The state, with its own budget problems, decided to grab $3 from every parking ticket issued.

U.S. officials said Thursday evening they have "specific, credible but unconfirmed" information about a threat against the United States coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. "We have received credible information very recently about a possible plot directed at the homeland that seems to be focused on New York and Washington, D.C.," a senior administration official told CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr. The official said the plot was believed to involve three individuals, including a U.S. citizen, who may have entered the United States. U.S. officials believed the threat was a vehicle laden with explosives, but...

Leadership: House Republicans are launching a pre-emptive strike against the president's forthcoming jobs plan. Instead of more Obamanomics, they offer real relief for private-sector job producers. Appearing on Fox News on Monday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., gave one of the most succinct descriptions of the Obama administration's economic policy yet heard. The White House, he said, has "demonstrated that it is not interested in focusing on private-sector growth." Instead, it has conducted "a continued expansion of government, continued grabs at trying to tell people who want to go out and invest and create a profit that maybe they've...

Twenty dollars for a parking place wasn't going to ruin Ellen Majka's day at the beach. But she was still taken aback when she arrived at Rhode Island's popular Scarborough state beach and learned that parking fees had nearly doubled. ... As states and municipalities continue to grapple with the recession's fallout, few turned to big, noticeable tax hikes this year. Instead, they're slashing spending and turning to more modest, narrowly crafted increases in fees and fines -- nickel-and-diming their way to a balanced budget. Louisiana and South Dakota raised state park fees, while California increased vehicle registration costs and...

From the West Coast to Washington, Republicans have fiercely embraced the "no new taxes" mantra - a move that in California, the GOP argued, will save $1,000 per family after the recent budget battle with Gov. Jerry Brown. But try telling that to Josh Renwick, a Stockton teacher who stood in line last week in San Francisco to buy tickets for Muni, the city's public transportation agency that has had three price increases in three years. With college tuition increasing again last week at the UC and CSU systems because of state budget cuts, many other Californians were crushed by...

<p>GOP Senators and Speaker Boehner set to cave and raise taxes. This is the start of the set up.</p>