With budget cuts coming, ABC and SBS stand divided

Did SBS chief executive Michael Ebeid score a well-timed free kick or an own goal in his attack on the ABC this week? The ABC recently secured the free-to-air television rights for the Asian Cup football tournament to be held in Australia early next year, together with tonight’s match between the Socceroos and Japan. A lower bid by SBS – still in some circles fondly known as the “Soccer Broadcasting Service” – was rejected, dealing a significant blow to the smaller public broadcaster. The ABC was reportedly asked to make a bid by Football Federation Australia. The FFA presumably believes the ABC’s coverage will attract larger audiences to the game. This is despite SBS’s long-term success with the sport. It should not be forgotten, however, that while SBS has largely been defined by its long connection with the world game, ABC was the home of football from the late 1950s until the 1980s. But the stoush is only partly about football. It was surely no coincidence that it comes on the eve of the government’s formal announcement of the size of the cuts to public broadcasting...

Effects of budget cuts on cities : hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, first session, December 15, 1981.

Mode of access: Internet.

Effects of budget cuts and deregulation on low and moderate-income groups in cities : hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, September 13, 1982.

Item 1013-A, 1013-B (microfiche)

Social Risk of Public Spending Cuts in Scotland: Local Authority Experiences

This paper relates to work supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which examines the way Scottish Local Authorities have approached budget cuts (Asenova, et. al., 2013). Starting with a discussion of notions of social risk, we discuss the heightened challenges faced by local authorities. We note that the literature on public sector innovation predict such pressures would cause local authorities to engage in short term decision making and adopt a static coping approach to risk mitigation which is likely to stifle innovation and obstruct the creation of more coherent and resilient localities. Although we find this to have happened in some areas, we discuss two cases where these challenges have promoted innovative and inclusive approaches to service re-design and delivery.

Efficient interactive budget planning and adjusting under financial stress

One of the most challenging tasks in financial management for large governmental and industrial organizations is Planning and Budgeting (P&B). The processes involved with P&B are cost and time intensive, especially when dealing with uncertainties and budget adjustments during the planning horizon. This work builds on our previous research in which we proposed and evaluated a fuzzy approach that allows optimizing the budget interactively beyond the initial planning stage. In this research we propose an extension that handles financial stress (i.e. drastic budget cuts) occurred during the budget period. This is done by introducing fuzzy stress parameters which are used to re-distribute the budget in order to minimize the negative impact of the financial stress. The benefits and possible issues of this approach are analyzed critically using a real world case study from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology (NIT). Additionally, ongoing and future research directions are presented.

Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture Budget Hearing

Good afternoon Senator Wehrbein and members of the Appropriations Committee. I am John Owens, and I am University of Nebraska Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources, and Harlan Vice Chancellor of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. I am here to speak with you about the impact of further budget cuts to the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture - NCTA - at Curtis, Nebraska.

Measuring burnout among UK social workers: A Community Care study

Preface Extract: This research was commissioned and funded by Community Care as part of our Stand Up For Social Work campaign. Previous surveys of readers had suggested caseloads, vacancies and stress levels were all on the increase. Community Care decided to do a more scientific examination of burnout on a large scale to assess the real impact of budget cuts and increasing demand on social workers across the UK.

Economia social, pilar de um novo modelo de desenvolvimento económico sustentável

Dissertação apresentada ao Instituto Superior de Contabilidade para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Auditoria Orientada por Dr.ª Alcina Portugal Dias

Mota-Engil new prospects of growth: Overcoming the financial crisis

The 2008 global financial crisis caused the collapse of business key sectors, declines in consumer wealth and a fall in economic activity resulting in a global recession. In some European countries, the 2008 crisis contributed to a sovereign-debt crisis which had a strong impact in Southern European countries. The construction sector was particularly affected, with budget cuts disturbing public investment and no financing available for private constructors. This report intends to explain how Mota-Engil, faced this situation of low growth, and which strategies were adopted by the management to overcome the difficult economic conjecture, mainly in its domestic market: Portugal. The report is organized as a case-study. The first part, the case narrative, is subdivided into 6 parts, and the second part is the teaching note. The teaching note is constituted by the four questions and their respective responses.

The tax treatment of employee stock options : generous to a fault

In the 2000 budgets, both the federal and Ontario governments introduced changes to the tax treatment of employee stock options for the explicit purpose of making their tax treatment in Canada similar to or more favourable than that in the United States. The federal budget added a deferral, similar to that currently applicable to options granted by Canadian-controlled private corporations, for up to $100,000 per year of public company stock options. The Ontario budget introduced an exemption from tax for employees involved in research and development on the first $100,000 per year of employee benefits arising on the exercise of qualified stock options or on eligible capital gains arising from the sale of shares acquired by the exercise of eligible stock options. These proposals reflect the apparent acceptance by the two governments that there is a “brain drain” from Canada to the United States of knowledge workers in the “new” economy and that reductions in Canadian taxes should stem this drain. In the author’s view, the tax treatment of employee stock options, even without these changes, is overly generous. Both the federal and provincial proposals ignore the fact that most employee stock options are taxed more favourably in Canada than in the United States in any event. In particular, most employee stock option benefits in Canada are taxed at capital gains tax rates, whereas in the United States most are taxed at full rates. While the US Internal Revenue Code does provide capital gains tax treatment for certain employee stock option benefits, a number of preconditions must be met. Most important, the shares acquired pursuant to the options must be held for a minimum of one year after the option is exercised. In addition, there are monetary limits on the amount of options that qualify for capital gains treatment. In Canada, there are generally no holding period requirements or monetary limits that apply in order for the option holder to benefit from capital gains tax rates. Empirical evidence indicates that the vast majority of employees in the United States exercise their options and immediately sell the shares acquired. These “cashless exercises” do not benefit from capital gains treatment in the United States, whereas similar cashless exercises in Canada generally do. This empirical evidence suggests not only that the 2000 budget proposals are unwarranted, but also that the existing treatment of employee stock options in Canada is already more generous than that in the United States. This article begins with a theoretical “benchmark” for the taxation of employee stock options. The author suggests that employee stock options should be treated in the same manner as other income from employment. In theory, the value of the benefit should be included in income when the option is granted or vests. However, owing to the practical difficulty of valuing employee stock options, the theoretical benchmark proposed is that the value of the benefit (the difference between the fair market value of the shares acquired and the strike price under the option) be taxed when the shares are acquired, and the employer be entitled to a corresponding deduction. The employee stock option rules in Canada and the United States are then compared and contrasted with each other and the benchmark treatment. The article then examines the arguments that have been made for favourable treatment of employee stock options. Included in this critique is a review of the recent empirical work on the Canadian brain drain. Empirical studies suggest that the brain drain—if it exists at all—is small and that, despite what many newspapers and right-wing think-tanks would have us believe, lower taxes in the United States are not the cause. One study, concluding that taxes do have an effect on migration, suggests that even if Canada adopted a tax system identical to that in the United States, the brain drain would be reduced by a mere 10 percent. Indeed, even if Canada eliminated income tax altogether, it would not stop the brain drain. If governments here want to spend money in order to stem the brain drain, they should focus on other areas. For example, Canada produces fewer university graduates in the fields of mathematics, sciences, and engineering than any other G7 country except Italy. The short supply of university graduates in these fields, the apparent loss of top-calibre academics to US
universities, and the consequent lower levels of university research in these areas (an important spawning ground for new ideas in the “new” knowledge-based economy) suggest that Canada may be better served by devoting more resources to its university institutions, particularly in post-graduate programs, rather than continuing the current trend of budget cuts that universities have endured and may further endure if taxes are reduced.
As far as employee stock options are concerned, if Canada does want to look to the United States for guidance on tax reform (which it seems to do with increasing frequency of late), it should adopt the US rules applicable to nonstatutory options, which are close to the proposed benchmark treatment. In the absence of preferential tax treatment, employee stock options would still be included in compensation packages provided that there were sound business reasons for their use. No persuasive evidence has been put forward that the use of stock options, in the absence of tax incentives, is suboptimal. Indeed, the US experience suggests quite the opposite.

Keep watch : your kids would be worse off without the ABC

Part of a series commissioned by The Conversation to explore the implications of proposed Coalition budget cuts to the ABC