U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, along with Representative Tim Walz, have announced more than $1.5 million for infrastructure improvements at Albert Lea Municipal Airport.
Major trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama appear harder to enact than they were to negotiate, even though many corporate executives and economists insist they provide just what the U.S. economy needs: jobs.
A $4.7 million federal grant that will help pay for the new Duluth International Airport passenger terminal was announced on Thursday.
The money from the Federal Aviation Administration through the Department of Transportation was announced by the offices of U.S. Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar.
U.S. Sen. Al Franken, an early and vocal opponent of AT&T’s $39 billion bid for T-Mobile, praised the Justice Department’s decision Wednesday to try to block the deal, saying it would limit competition and drive up prices for consumers.
U.S. Sen. Al Franken stopped in Park Rapids Monday afternoon to visit with Lamb-Weston RDO Frozen employees and take a quick tour of downtown.
“I’m visiting with manufacturers all over the state,” Franken said. “Each facility has different specific issues I need to know about.”
When Dodd-Frank passed, I said that the legislation was not a bill but a plan to write a bill later. Dodd-Frank had dozens of studies and rules that would be written and implemented by regulators. The legislation would offer a rough guideline, but ultimately it would be up to the regulators to actually determine whether or not it would make a difference.
The Dodd-Frank Act cracked down on the credit rating agencies, the firms that awarded rosy ratings to bonds backed by junky mortgages, but some lawmakers and consumer advocates contend that the regulatory overhaul falls short.
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White Earth tribal leaders say they won’t wait any longer to devise solutions for the devastating addictions that plague their communities.
“We have buried too many young people; have seen too many lives destroyed; too many homes, too many communities damaged,” tribal Chairwoman Erma Vizenor said Monday before a crowd of about 300 people gathered in Mahnomen for a substance abuse summit aimed at Native American communities.
The Government Accountability Office gave a fairly glowing report about the efect of the federal medical loss ratio, a policy inserted into the Affordable Care Act by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) that forces insurance companies to spend 80-85% of their premiums (depending on the type of coverage) on medical treatment, and to rebate customers if they fall short of that ratio. After rulewriting, the MLR in place includes expenses for activities that improve health care quality as treatment, and excludes federal and state taxes and licensing fees paid by insurance companies from the total pot of premiums. Even then, insurance companies interviewed by GAO were eliminating some of the middleman waste in the system to get under the ratio, premium money that wasn’t doing anything for real people. Insurers are also lowering premiums as a result. And for the most part, the MLR wasn’t stopping insurance companies from doing business. (The PPACA refers to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the below excerpt.)
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Minnesota U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-St. Paul) is calling for an extension of the payroll tax holiday. The law that lowered the payroll tax from six-point-two to four-point-two percent expires in January.
