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The raspberry-colored walls are up — as is the large “American Girl” sign with stars dotting the “i”s.

When the highly-anticipated store opens later this week in Chesterfield Mall, lines of devoted fans are expected to snake outside the store as they wait to buy $100 dolls. But many parents haven’t waited for the grand opening to book children’s birthday parties there, with reservations already scheduled for several months out.

The store’s arrival — and the diehard following it brings along — is being welcomed with open arms by Chesterfield Mall. The shopping center has struggled in recent years with declining sales and a lower occupancy rate than many other area malls.

Katie Reinsmidt, spokeswoman for CBL & Associates, the mall’s owner, said the mall has already been moving in a positive direction this year with a rise in both traffic and sales.

“I think things are turning the corner,” she said.

And the American Girl store can’t do anything but help bring more visitors and buzz, she added.

“Other retailers at the center are anticipating some additional traffic — it will definitely have some cross benefit,” she said. “There’s nothing like it in the mall today.”

That’s what Angie Sicard hopes. Her specialty toy store, Toy Tyme, caters to both girls and boys.

“Families are going to spend so much on girls (at American Girl), that the boys are going to want something, too,” she said. “So they are going to come to our store” or other retailers in the mall.

Wade Opland, American Girl’s vice president of retail, said retailers near new American Girl stores usually see a double-digit sales lift regardless of whether it’s a cookie store or clothing store.

“We’re like the Apple of girls business for a mall,” he said, referring to the high traffic and sales that Apple brings to mall-based stores. “That’s why we’re so sought after.”

Whereas most mall stores pull from an area of about 20 miles, American Girl stores draw customers from a 150 to 200-mile radius, Opland said.

The Chesterfield store is one of three stores American Girl will open this year; the other two slated to open later this year are in Miami and Houston.

But while the retailer, which began as a direct-to-consumer catalog company, has been growing its bricks-and-mortar footprints in recent years, it doesn’t expect to have more than 20 stores nationwide, Opland said. The Chesterfield store is American Girl’s 12th store nationwide and will be the retailer’s only store in Missouri.

The retailer was drawn to Chesterfield Mall for its “premier” mix of stores and because it is in the midst of a growing community with many young families, Opland said.

“Part of our strategy is we want to put these stores where mom, girls, and families live,” he said guaranteed pay day loans. “At Chesterfield Mall, we’re in a prime location where mom can see us and it has a plethora of parking.”

The 10,850 square-foot store, which has an exterior entrance to the mall, is going into the space formerly occupied by the restaurant Wapango.

CBL’s Reinsmidt said Chesterfield Mall has a great location in an area with attractive demographics.

“But Chesterfield had unfortunate luck going into the recession,” she said. “Pretty much anytime a national bankruptcy announcement was made, there was one of those stores at Chesterfield.”

Borders and The Sharper Image are two examples. And some retailers — such as Abercrombie & Fitch, which shuttered its store in Chesterfield Mall earlier this year — have been paring back their number of mall stores nationwide, she said.

In late 2009, the mall began inviting local artists to fill some empty spaces in the mall as part of Artropolis — similar to ailing Crestwood Court’s now mostly-defunct ArtSpace.

By the end of 2011, Chesterfield Mall’s store space was 93 percent leased, up from 84 percent in 2007, according to CBL’s annual report.

But even though it has fewer vacancies, the mall’s sales per square foot in those mall stores (not including anchors) dropped 17 percent to $270 during that same time period. By comparison, sales per square feet at other CBL malls in the area range from $475 at West County Center to $400 at St. Claire Square to $364 at South County Center.

Reinsmidt said one of the challenges for Chesterfield Mall is that there is a lot of space to fill — nearly 500,000 square feet of store space not including anchors. That is more than any of CBL’s other four malls in the region.

And when the mall’s previous owner, Westfield, refurbished the mall in a $71 million project in 2006, it added more store space with a wing that includes the movie theater, food court, stores and restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory.

“They expanded the small shop space rather than contracting it,” she said.

With so much space, many of Chesterfield’s stores are a bit larger than in other malls, which lowers the mall’s sales-per-square-foot number, she said.

“The stores are really profitable and have great volumes,” she said.

As some stores leave, new tenants continue to come to the mall. Francesca’s Collections opened in the last week or so. And Monsoon, a London-based children’s retailer, is planning to open a store there this summer.

And, of course, there is American Girl. It plans a “soft” opening on Wednesday followed by a grand opening celebration on Saturday and Sunday.

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President Obama made a broad push Tuesday for increasing taxes on the wealthy and in particular proposed Buffett Rule.

His address to college students in Florida came on the heels of a White House report that laid out its case, arguing that the Buffett Rule would make the tax code fairer and make it harder for the very rich to lower their tax bills.

Quiz: What the rich really pay in taxes

"What drags our entire economy down is when the benefits of economic growth and productivity go only to the few … and the gap between those at the very, very top and everybody else keeps growing wider and wider," Obama said.

The Buffett Rule is a key talking point in Obama’s re-election bid. The general principle behind it is that millionaires and billionaires like investor Warren Buffett shouldn’t pay a lower percentage of their income in federal taxes than middle-class households.

Obama has even set a threshold for how much they should pay: At least 30% of their income.

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Most millionaires today already pay a higher percentage of their income in federal taxes than the vast majority of all Americans. But roughly 25% of them end up with a lower effective tax rate than 10% of middle-income households, according to the Congressional Research Service.

And a very small number — fewer than 1,500 households in 2009, according to the IRS — end up owing no federal income tax at all.

Obama’s Buffett Rule is targeted specifically at those high-income households that are in a position to structure their income and engage in legal tax strategies to minimize their tax bite.

Millionaires who owe no federal income tax

"The idea behind the Buffett Rule is to have a tax on high-income earners who manage to avoid paying a large share of their income in taxes," Alan Krueger, director of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a call with reporters.

They can do so if much of their income comes from capital gains and dividends — which are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary paychecks. The same is true if they have made tax-free or tax-sheltered investments.

And a number of other tax breaks on the books end up disproportionately benefiting high-income households.

Krueger asserted that the Buffett Rule would also make for good tax policy by making the tax code more efficient. That is, there would be less incentive for the wealthy to choose one investment or financial activity over another or to recharacterize their income simply to reduce their tax bills.

Tax experts, however, say the goals of the Buffett Rule could be accomplished more simply through a complete overhaul of the tax code.

Indeed, Obama initially proposed the Buffett Rule as a guiding principle for reform. But Senate Democrats are now pushing a bill to implement a version of the rule in today’s tax code. And the White House is now endorsing that push.

Tax reform is likely to be a long slog, and implementing a Buffett Rule now would be a "simple and common sense" step toward reform, said Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the National Economic Council. 

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BATS Global Markets says it will replace Joe Ratterman as chairman of the board, even as the company’s directors expressed support for him as chief executive.

The announcement Tuesday came after technical difficulties derailed the exchange operator’s initial public offering last week.

BATS operates electronic markets for stocks and stock options in the United States and Europe. The Kansas-based company is a leading platform for high-frequency, computer-driven trading.

In a brief statement, BATS directors said Ratterman "continues to do a tremendous job as CEO of BATS."

"We fully support his leadership, vision and strategic direction as BATS continues to enhance competition and foster innovation in markets worldwide," the statement said.

But the directors still voted to replace Ratterman as chairman under "an enhanced corporate governance structure."

Ratterman, who has been the company’s chairman since 2007, will hold the position until a replacement is named, the directors said saving account payday loan.

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BATS officially withdrew its IPO late Friday after it was forced to halt trading in its own stock and others because the company’s technology malfunctioned.

Ratterman publicly apologized for the problem, saying in a letter to customers that the company’s failure to perform "has no excuses."

BATS is third largest exchange operator in the United States after NYSE Euronext (, Fortune 500), which operates the New York Stock Exchange, and the NASDAQ OMX Group. ()

The company said this week that its troubles have not impacted its market share.

As of Monday, BATS boasted a 10.3% share of the U.S. equities market and a 25.4% share of the European market. 

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The House on Tuesday passed a bill making it easier for more companies to become publicly traded by bypassing audits and disclosures now required for investors.

The House voted 380-to-41 to pass the bill, which the Senate passed last week. The passage sends the bill to President Obama, who has indicated support.

The measure rolls back some rules the Securities and Exchange Commission enforces on small and medium companies attempting to make an initial public offering or IPOs.

"It is a victory for small companies and entrepreneurs who want Washington to reduce the red tape that stifles innovation, economic growth and job creation," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican who heads the House Financial Services Committee.

The bill has sparked concern from the retirement group AARP, investor groups, unions, consumer groups and even the head of the SEC. All of them said the bill could open the door for more failed IPOs and investor fraud.

The bill would relax SEC rules for small and medium-sized companies with less than $1 billion in gross revenue seeking to go public. The measure gives them up to five years, or until revenue tops $1 billion, to supply an independent audit and certain investor disclosures.

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Critics said $1 billion is too high a threshold — some 80% of firms going public would be able to bypass disclosures.

It would also make it easier for companies with as many as 2,000 shareholders to avoid registering with regulators.

The bill would also exempt firms from nonbinding shareholder votes on executive pay and benefits packages, which just came as part of the Wall Street reform law. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the law made it tougher for CEOs to reap bonuses tied to soaring stock prices — particularly when the company is over-leveraged and making risky bets paydayloans.

Critics, including the Council of Institutional Investors, said that easing the rules applied to far too many companies and could make investors wary of investing in them.

"A company (with $1 billion in revenues) has the resources to comply with disclosures," said Jeff Mahoney, general counsel to the Council of Institutional Investors.

The bill would also allow companies to solicit investors — including the use of advertisements — when going public, which is currently prohibited. And it would allow them to raise money from larger numbers of small, less sophisticated investors.

Barbara Roper of the Consumer Federation of America warned the provision would make it easier for companies to take advantage of seniors, luring them to sink their retirement savings into an IPO.

"A retiree who has that nest egg isn’t necessarily a sophisticated investor and shouldn’t be speculating on private offerings," Roper said.

The bill would also allow what’s called "crowd funding," allowing firms to bypass regulations to raise money from large pools of small investors by directly soliciting them over the Internet. Critics are concerned about the potential for fraud.

The only change that the Senate made last week was to require that those working as an intermediary to such crowd funding register with regulators.

"The bill is far from perfect, but it’s a good bill," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week. "It’ll help capital formation." 

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In a year when political stalemate is expected to block any real progress on fiscal reforms, House Republicans will take a swing at tax reform in their fiscal year 2013 budget proposal due out on Tuesday morning.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and his caucus will call for a reduction in individual tax rates and brackets. Instead of today’s six brackets, with rates from 10% to 35%, they are calling for just two — 10% and 25%. It’s not clear how much income would fall under each bracket. (Washington’s $5 trillion interest bill)

The Republican proposal, worked out with House Ways & Means head Dave Camp, would also eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax altogether.

Although originally intended to ensure that the very wealthy pay taxes, the AMT was never structured to keep pace with inflation.

So on paper the AMT is scheduled to bring in trillions of dollars in revenue over the coming years because it would capture more and more taxpayers who are not wealthy. But every year Congress passes costly "patches" to protect the middle class from having to pay the AMT, and adds the cost of those patches to the deficit.

Quiz: What the rich really pay in taxes

It was not immediately clear whether the House GOP plans to replace that forecasted revenue, but it seems unlikely since it is proposing to keep revenues as a share of the economy on par with the 40-year average of 18.1% of the economy’s GDP.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, revenues as a share of GDP have hit 60-year lows, coming in at around 15%. And going forward, independent budget experts have said the country may need to bring in more revenue than the historical average to meet entitlement benefit promises and adequately fund programs without slashing too deeply in any one area of the budget.

On the corporate tax side, the House GOP would lower the top tax rate to 25% from 35% and switch the United States to territorial system of taxation, meaning that U.S. multinational companies would only owe tax on foreign-made profits to the government of the country in which the profits were made.

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Currently, a U.S. company owes U.S. taxes on foreign profits once the money is brought home, and they can subtract from their Washington tax bill taxes they have already paid to the country where the profits were made. Some estimate that U.S. companies may be parking as much as $1 trillion abroad.

The House GOP proposal on corporate taxes differs from President Obama’s. He would lower the corporate tax rate to 28% and impose a minimum tax on foreign-made profits the year they were made to discourage companies from parking money abroad.

And as they have at every turn, House Republicans will reject outright most of Obama’s tax proposals for individuals, particularly those on the wealthy, including his proposed Buffett Rule to ensure millionaires pay at least 30% of their income in federal tax.

The emphasis on tax reform in advance of the formal release of the House Republican budget may indicate the GOP’s desire to turn the conversation away from their anticipated and polarizing proposals to reform Medicare and to cap discretionary spending at levels lower than the top cap agreed to by both parties last summer.

Democrats have expressed opposition to both prospects.

House Republicans are expected to propose a spending level that is about $20 billion less than that specified by the Budget Control Act, the deal that ended the bitter fight over the debt ceiling in August. If that’s the case, that could set off a battle with the Democratic-controlled Senate on federal spending just weeks before the November election.

Meanwhile, the most conservative factions in the House have been pushing for the GOP to propose spending levels lower than those likely to be proposed on Tuesday. 

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The cost of living in the U.S. probably rose in February as gasoline prices climbed, economists said before a report today.

The consumer-price index increased 0.4 percent, the most in 10 months, after advancing 0.2 percent in January, according to the median forecast of 79 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. The so-called core, which excludes volatile food and energy expenses, may have climbed 0.2 percent for a second month. Industrial production probably rebounded in February, another report may show.

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