Truth

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Arizona

Arizona
Showing posts with label IRS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IRS. Show all posts

Sunday, August 8, 2010

No Confidence

Some 11 million to 15 million illegal aliens are now residing in America, most after crossing into America unlawfully. Once a federal law is arbitrarily not enforced, all sorts of bizarre paradoxes arise from that original contradiction. As proof, examine the following illogical policies and contradictions involving illegal immigration.
Take, for example, profiling — the controversial questioning of those who appear likely to be illegal aliens. Apparently, American border guards have developed criteria for profiling those deemed likely to be unlawful aliens. Otherwise, how would they have arrested and deported hundreds of thousands in 2009?
Yet apparently, at some arbitrary point distant from the border, those who cross illegally are not supposed to be asked about their immigration status. OK, but exactly why did procedures so radically change at, say, five, 10, 20, or is it 100 miles from the border? A border patrolman often profiles, but a nearby highway patrolman cannot?
The federal government is suing Arizona for the state’s efforts to enforce the federal immigration law. The lawsuit alleges that Arizona is too zealous both in enforcing immigration law and encroaching on federal jurisdiction.
But wait — for years, several American cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. City officials have even bragged that they would not allow their municipalities to enforce federal immigration statutes. So why does Washington sue a state that seeks to enhance federal immigration laws and yet ignore cities that blatantly try to erode them?
Something is going very wrong in Mexico to prompt more than half a million of its citizens to cross the border illegally each year. Impoverished Mexican nationals variously cite poor economic conditions back home, government corruption, a lack of social services, and racism.
In other words, it is not just the desirability of America but also the perceived undesirability of Mexico that explains one of largest mass exoduses in modern history.
But why, then, would Mexican President Felipe Calderon, whose country’s conditions are forcing out its own citizens, criticize the United States, which is receiving so many of them? And why, for that matter, would many of those illegal immigrants identify, if only symbolically, with the country that made them leave, whether by waving its flag or criticizing the attitudes of the Americans who took them in?
Americans Racist?
And how does Mexico treat the hundreds of thousands of aliens who seek to illegally cross its own southern border with Central America each year? Does Mexico believe in sovereign borders to its south but not to its north?
Is Mexico more or less humane to illegal aliens than the country it so often faults? Why, exactly, does Mexico believe that nearly a million of its own nationals annually have claims on American residency, when Chinese, Indian, European and African would-be immigrants are deemed not to? Is the reason proximity? Past history?

Proponents of open borders have organized May Day rallies, staged boycotts of Arizona, sued in federal and state courts, and sought to portray those who want to enforce existing federal immigration law as racially insensitive.
But about 70% of Americans support securing our borders, and support the Arizona law in particular. Are a clear majority of Americans racist, brainwashed or deluded in believing that their laws should be enforced? And if so, why would immigrants wish to join them?
Poor In Africa
It is considered liberal to support open borders and reactionary to want to close them. But illegal immigration drives down the hourly wages of the working American poor. Tens of thousands of impoverished people abroad, from Africa to Asia, wait patiently to enter America legally, while hundreds of thousands from Latin America do not. How liberal can all that be?
America extends housing, food and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year — its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost all of it from its own nationals living in the United States.
Are Americans then subsidizing the Mexican government by extending social services to aliens, freeing up cash for them to send back home?
These baffling questions are rarely posed, never addressed and often considered politically incorrect. But they will only be asked more frequently in the months ahead.
You see, once a law is not considered quite a law, all sorts of even stranger paradoxes follow.(IBD)

Examiner:  The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council and its affiliated local councils cast a unanimous 259-0 vote of no confidence in ICE Director John Morton and Assistant Director Phyllis Coven, according to Fox News Channel’s Martha MacCallum.
The National Council members criticized the ICE leadership and claim they created “misguided and reckless initiatives,” and claim ICE managers “abandoned the Agency’s core mission of enforcing United States immigration laws and providing for public safety, and have instead directed their attention to campaigning for policies and programs related to amnesty.”
ICE is misleading the American public with regard to the effectiveness of criminal enforcement programs like the ICE “Secure Communities Program” using it as a selling point to move forward with amnesty related legislation. As officers in the field, we know this program will not improve enforcement or provide for public safety because ICE refuses, for political reasons, to request the additional manpower and resources needed to adequately operate the program.
[...]
The majority of ICE ERO Officers are prohibited from making street arrests or enforcing United States immigration laws outside of the institutional (jail) setting. This has effectively created “amnesty through policy” for anyone illegally in the United States who has not been arrested by another agency for a criminal violation.(American Thinker)
Besides Morton’s and Coven’s low marks, the Obama Administration recently appointed a former police chief, who believes in illegal alien sanctuary city policies, to command the immigration enforcement program that entails federal agents working with local police departments on cases involving illegal aliens.

Morton’s defenders are equally fervent. “We often say we are a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. John brings a great deal of sensitivity to both aspects of our identity,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which, like ICE, is part of the Department of Homeland Security. (WP)
This would be the same agency, the USCIS that has been linked extensively to the end-run Amnesty by “deferred action” in the memo released recently.
And doesn’t this person sound like a Pro-Illegal??

Retired Border Agent Harold Beasley said, “I see people in my hometown of Phoenix, Ariz., now demonstrating, carrying signs, saying that I owe them something. I owe them rights. I owe them, you know, welfare. I owe them this and I owe them that.”(CBS)
And they still love to carry Mexican Flags while doing it!

Here’s a Bombshell I found buried in a CBS report:
It’s often said illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes. Hermann does pay taxes, and showed me his returns. He doesn’t have a Social Security number, but the IRS gives undocumented workers a special taxpayer number information that’s not shared with immigration authorities.
So the government IS complicit in Illegal Immigration and not interested in enforcement. Not Really.
They have the same monetary stake as Mexico in making sure no one really ever does anything substantial about illegal immigration.
Willful abandonment for money. Now if that isn’t corruption, what is?

Many immigrants think coming to America is like winning a lottery.(CBS) Notice the word “illegal” is verboten? :)
As part of the Homeland Security Department’s anti-terrorism mission, the new director for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of State and Local Coordination is now Harold Hurtt, an outspoken critic of immigration enforcement on the local level such as Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law.
“As police chief in two different cities with huge illegal alien populations—Phoenix and Houston—Hurtt enforced don’t-ask-don’t-tell immigration measures that prevented officers from inquiring about a suspects’ legal status in the U.S.,” according to officials at Judicial Watch, a non-partisan, public-interest group that investigates public corruption.
“We can expect Chief Hurtt to continue to ‘protect’ criminal aliens as part of the Obama Administration’s ‘national security team” that includes other leftists who side with criminal aliens such as Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other Obama appointees,” said former military intelligence officer and NYPD police detective Mike Snopes.
His pro-immigration policies enabled illegal immigrants with extensive criminal histories to murder two police officers and seriously injure another while he was chief in Phoenix and later in Houston. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against Hurtt on behalf of the deceased Houston officer’s wife for implementing the sanctuary policies that led to her husband’s murder at the hands of an illegal alien fugitive.
Mexican Rep Leticia Amparano-Gamez, who represents Nogales, asked, ” How can Arizona pass a law like this?” indignantly adding, “There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or relative working in Arizona. Mexico is not prepared for this, for the tremendous problems it will face as more and more Mexicans working in Arizona and who were sending money to their families return to their home-towns in Sonora without jobs. We are one family, socially and economically.“  She was speaking in Spanish about the social and economic family of Mexico and Arizona.
Nothing personal, but really, Mexico, your  “poor relations”  are not  America’s “family” nor America’s  problem to support. Don’t cry for Arizona, Mexico, take care of your own family. As  “Thomas Paine” has said,  “The greatest compassion you can show for 20 million illegal immigrants is to teach them the rule of law.”
AMEN!

But the government would rather have the latino votes to continue their power , gin up a race war, and the use the  money to hide their own malfeasance!
But We are from the Government and we are here to protect and serve! :)

Sunday, July 18, 2010

The Truth of Power

I, like many others who read the health care bills, unlike the mainstream Media, which did it’s best to hide and deny what was going to happen, have now been shown the light of our truth.
But I’m sure the Ministry of Truth will do it’s best to diminish, dismiss and deny it even now.
That is that Mandatory Health Insurance is a TAX.
Shocking revelation, I know… :)

On poor people no less!!
CBS Sept 2009: President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don’t would not amount to a backhanded tax increase. “I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said.
“My critics say everything is a tax increase,” Mr. Obama said on “This Week.” “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”
ABC: The—for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore . . .” In other words, like parents talking to their children, this levy—don’t call it a tax—is for your own good.
Mr. Stephanopoulos: “But you reject that it’s a tax increase?”
Mr. Obama: “I absolutely reject that notion.”
President Obama said in his not quite State of the Union address that Americans earning less than $250,000 would pay “not one dime” in new taxes.
Well, it’s time to reveal Lie #4,362. The Big Whopper.
The one all of us “racist” “teabagger” “idiots” and “terrorist” warned you about.

WASHINGTON — When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.
In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.
Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.
While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.
“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy. Nowhere does Congress cite its taxing power as a source of authority.
They knew they were lying. They didn’t care. Because the end justified the means.
And the Mainstream Media was either brain-dead stupid or in on the lies. Period.
Under the Constitution, Congress can exercise its taxing power to provide for the “general welfare.” It is for Congress, not courts, to decide which taxes are “conducive to the general welfare,” the Supreme Court said 73 years ago in upholding the Social Security Act.
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, described the tax power as an alternative source of authority.
“The Commerce Clause supplies sufficient authority for the shared-responsibility requirements in the new health reform law,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “To the extent that there is any question of additional authority — and we don’t believe there is — it would be available through the General Welfare Clause.”
The law describes the levy on the uninsured as a “penalty” rather than a tax. The Justice Department brushes aside the distinction, saying “the statutory label” does not matter. The constitutionality of a tax law depends on “its practical operation,” not the precise form of words used to describe it, the department says, citing a long line of Supreme Court cases.
Orwell is smiling on you, Mr President and AG Holder.
Masters of Doublespeak.
Orwell on “The Party” of Big Brother: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…(Orwell, New American Library, 1981, p35)
Moreover, the department says the penalty is a tax because it will raise substantial revenue: $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In addition, the department notes, the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, and people must report it on their tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.”
2009: What’s more, the agency is limited in the actions it can take to enforce compliance. “Congress was very careful to make sure that there was nothing too punitive in this bill,” {IRS Chief} Shulman said. “There’s no criminal sanctions for not paying this, and there’s no ability to levy a bank account or do seizures or [use] some of the other tools” available to the agency for enforcing laws.
If necessary, the IRS will levy fines against individuals who fail to purchase adequate insurance and collect them though tax return offsets. But the agency’s “first line of defense is education,” he said.
Because the penalty is a tax, the department says, no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund.
Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the new law, said, “The tax argument is the strongest argument for upholding” the individual-coverage requirement.
Mr. Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill,” Mr. Balkin said last month at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization. “This bill is a tax. Because it’s a tax, it’s completely constitutional.”
Mr. Balkin and other law professors pressed that argument in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in one of the pending cases.
Opponents contend that the “minimum coverage provision” is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s power to regulate commerce.
“This is the first time that Congress has ever ordered Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.

In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”

In reply, the administration and its allies say that a person who goes without insurance is simply choosing to pay for health care out of pocket at a later date. In the aggregate, they say, these decisions have a substantial effect on the interstate market for health care and health insurance.
In its legal briefs, the Obama administration points to a famous New Deal case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court upheld a penalty imposed on an Ohio farmer who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use.
The wheat grown by Roscoe Filburn “may be trivial by itself,” the court said, but when combined with the output of other small farmers, it significantly affected interstate commerce and could therefore be regulated by the government as part of a broad scheme regulating interstate commerce.

But it will bring prices down: Lie #4,264
The Democratic co-chair of President Obama’s fiscal commission said Wednesday that the president’s health care bill will do very little to bring down costs, contradicting claims from the White House that their sweeping legislation will dramatically impact runaway entitlement spending.
“It didn’t do a lot to address cost factors in health care. So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, speaking about the new health law, which was signed into law by Obama this past spring after a nearly year-long fight in Congress.
Esrkine Bowles is one of the two stooges who will anounce AFTER the mid-term election that all is crap and we have to have massive Tax increases in order to save us all, including likely, the VAT.
And if the republicans are in charge of at least one side or both of Congress it will be even  more there fault! :)
And Obama is going to, “Well, I have to do what the report says…”
It’s the ultimate Dog & Pony show.
Just keep that in mind.
Bowles, speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that even with the passage of Obama’s legislation, health care costs are still going to “really eat us alive” unless dramatic changes are made. The commission will submit recommendations on how to fix America’s long term fiscal problems to Congress in December.
Bowles’ point will be amplified Thursday when a conservative think tank releases a paper arguing that Obama’s health plan “is not entitlement reform,” at an event intended to highlight an alternative plan for reforming health care spending that is the brainchild of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican.
James C. Capretta, a former White House budget adviser on health care to President George W. Bush, will present the paper for the Galen Institute at an event on Capitol Hill with Ryan, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top conservative economist.
Even as many on Capitol Hill are talking about addressing Social Security spending, Capretta writes in the 19-page paper that Medicare is the real problem.
Most Democrats and Republicans agree, Capretta says, that the 30 to 35 million seniors in Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) insurance program are “the engine … pulling the rest of the health system down the tracks at an accelerated and dangerous rate.”
And who just got recess appointee to the job of head of Medicare, a NHS Single-payer Health Care rationing lover.
No coincidence there mind you. :)
Most FFS participants pay nothing out of their own pockets for health care, and hospitals and doctors are incentivized to provide them with as many services and tests as can be loosely justified.
But Capretta says in the paper that the Obama health bill is not reform because it attempts to stop price inflation and inefficient care through top-down government control rather than bottom-up consumer demand.
“When attempts have been made in the past to steer patients toward preferred physicians or hospitals, they have failed miserably because politicians and regulators find it impossible to make distinctions among hospitals and physician groups based on quality measures that can themselves be disputed,” Capretta says.
Capretta goes on to say that Paul Ryan’s plan would move Medicare recipients from defined benefits to defined contributions, in which “cost-conscious consumers choose between competing insurers and delivery systems based on price and quality.”
“Beneficiaries would get to decide which insurance plan they want to enroll in. If the premium were more than the amount they are entitled to from Medicare, then they would pay the difference. If it were less, they would keep all of the savings,” Capretta says.
“Millions of otherwise passive Medicare participants would become active, cost-conscious consumers of insurance and alternative models for securing needed medical services,” Capretta writes. “Cost cutting innovation would be rewarded, not punished as it is today.”
White House officials pointed to recent blog posts by White House budget director Peter Orszag, who said that “if implemented effectively, [Obama’s health care bill] can play an important role in moving toward a healthier fiscal future.” (Daily Caller)

Welcome Big Brother Obama and Big Mother Michelle’s New and Improved IRS:
If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare. What, you’re not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency’s new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already “greatly taxed”—pun intended?—”by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public,” like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for “the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.” And without “sufficient funding” it won’t be able to discharge these new duties.
That wouldn’t be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance “as required by law” and collecting penalties from Americans who don’t. Companies that don’t sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will “involve nearly every division and function of the IRS,” Ms. Olson reports.

Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn’t figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.
Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farms and one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.
Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical “tax gap” of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance.” Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.
Meanwhile, the IRS will be inundated with useless information, because without a huge upgrade its information systems won’t be able to manage and track the nanodetails.
In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new “burden” on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find “better ways to structure this reporting requirement.” In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.
We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.(WSJ)
On Friday, Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. His plea to fellow Democrats to pass a $22.9-billion fix for Medicare doctors’ fees reveals the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
Remember the health care issue? Well, the fiscal consequences of the socialized medicine scheme enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress just two months ago are already beginning to snowball.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was one of the key architects and advocates of Obamacare. He was back on the House floor on Friday delivering an urgent plea to fellow Democrats that inadvertently—or, perhaps, unavoidably—revealed the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
It was supposed to save the taxpayers money, remember? “This legislation will lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades,” Obama said when he signed the bill.
On Friday, Waxman declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. He went to the House floor to “urge” his colleagues to vote for a bill that includes $102 billion in new federal spending and would add $54 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years — $25 billion of it in the few months remaining in this fiscal year.
Why did Waxman believe this new borrowing-and-spending was necessary?
“It’s absolutely critical to do this if we are going to keep doctors in Medicare and keep the promise to Medicare beneficiaries that they will have access to physicians’ services,” said Waxman. “This provision will provide a moderate increase in physicians’ fees, 2.2 percent for the rest of the year. If we don’t act, doctors’ fees will be cut by 21 percent from where they are today. This would be unconscionable.”
It would not merely be unconscionable. If the 21-percent cut in Medicare fees for doctors—that, in fact, legally took effect on June 1 — is allowed to stand, many doctors in this country will simply stop seeing Medicare patients. They will not be able to afford it. The cost to them of serving their patients will exceed what they are paid. Their profit margin will be swept away.
To make precisely this point, 12 national surgeons’ associations—including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons and the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery—sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter last Wednesday warning her what would happen if Medicare doctors’ fees are slashed as they are scheduled to be under current law.
“These continued payment cuts, rising practice costs and a lack of certainty going forward, make it difficult, if not impossible, for already financially challenged surgical practices to continue to treat Medicare patients,” the surgeons’ associations told Pelosi.
The letter pointed the speaker toward the results of a survey of more than 13,000 physicians done in February by the Surgical Coalition, a group of more than 20 medical associations. The survey asked these doctors what they would do if Medicare fees were slashed by the scheduled 21.2 percent.
Twenty-nine percent said they would opt out of the Medicare system entirely. Almost 69 percent said they would limit the number of appointments they would take from Medicare patients, 45.8 percent said they would start referring complex Medicare patients to other physicians, 45.3 percent said they would stop providing certain services, 43.8 percent said they would defer purchasing new medical equipment and 42.7 percent said they would cut their staff. Almost 4 percent of the doctors said they would close or sell their practices.
Why did Congress plan to slash the doctors’ Medicare fees in the first place? It didn’t. In the past, the majority in Congress has routinely enacted budget bills that fraudulently assumed that on some future date the federal government would dramatically slash the Medicare fees paid to doctors, knowing that before that date arrived the majority would pass “emergency” legislation postponing the cuts to some still-future date. The majority in Congress does this so the long-term deficits caused by their spending bills appear to be smaller than they actually are.
As originally proposed, Obamacare would have ended this practice, permanently setting Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors at the true anticipated level. But the Congressional Budget Office determined that doing so would have added $208 billion to the cost of Obamacare over 10 years, forcing the CBO to declare that Obamacare added to the deficit rather than reduced it. That would have cost Obamacare votes on the House floor and quite possibly defeated the legislation.
So the congressional leadership stripped the “doc fix” out of Obamacare and left it to another day.
Waxman went down to the floor last Friday to declare that day had come. Unfortunately, for him, the Senate had already left town for its Memorial Day vacation. So, the current fix will have to wait until it returns.
Even then, the fix only accounts for $22.9 billion of the $102 billion cost of the bill the House did pass on Friday. Most of the rest of the money is for extending unemployment benefits and special targeted tax breaks.
The $22.9 billion fix for the doctors’ fees—if passed by the Senate—would only last through September 2011. Then Congress will presumably do it all again—or let the Medicare system collapse.
And they did.
In the meantime, Obamacare is supposed to cut half a trillion in spending from elsewhere in Medicare, while Obama’s budget—not counting the $54 billion in new debt included in this bill—is expected to add $9.8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.(IBD)

And then there’s still more on the “Financial Reform” bill related to the IRS:
“Small businesses are America’s job creators and essential to our nation’s economy,” Roberts said in prepared remarks. “Under the new healthcare law, small businesses will be hit with a costly tax reporting provision that will increase the cost of doing business at a time of economic uncertainty.”
Beginning in 2012, the law states that businesses, tax-exempt organizations, and state and local governments must submit a separate 1099 form for every business-to-business transaction totaling more than $600. The impetus behind the requirement is help the IRS better enforce the tax law by forcing companies to disclose whom they do business with.
Several organizations, including the IRS watchdog The National Taxpayer Advocate, have questioned how effective this requirement will be on enforcement.
The new mandate applies to everyday purchases, like shipping costs, supplies, even Internet and phone service. The senators argue this will overburden companies. The Taxpayer Advocate questions the IRS’ ability to handle all the documentation.
“Unless corrected, this time-wasting mandate of 1099 filings on common purchases needed to do business, will stifle economic growth and job creation while the IRS will be handed a paperwork nightmare,” Roberts said.
The senators contend the requirement will affect 40 million businesses nationwide.
“I have heard from many Kansas small businesses and farmers, already burdened with government bureaucracy, that these new reporting requirements will waste time and negatively impact their bottom-line,” Roberts said.

Abortion, anyone?
As reports are coming out that Pennsylvania is receiving $160 million from the Department of Health and Human Services to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that will fund abortions, we are seeing, yet again, that the Obama Administration will say and do anything to pass their liberal agenda — ignoring public opinion along the way…
LIES: “You’ve heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion – not true. These are all fabrications.” — President Obama on August 19, 2009
D*MN LIES: “The executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.” — White House Statement on March 21, 2010
STATISTICS: 67 percent of Americans oppose funding abortions with public funds under the health care bill. — Quinnipiac University Poll, January 14, 2010
As pundits have commented in recent weeks, and many of us have realized, you need to watch what the President really does, not listen to what he says, as the two are often in vast contrast of one another. As you can read above, nowhere is this truer than on the issue of abortion.
Back in March, when the offer to sign an Executive Order was made, many pro-lifers questioned why the order was needed after President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Secretary Sebelius had been saying for months that no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions. On the day of the vote, I personally spoke on the House floor about how an Executive Order has no effect of law and cannot override the clear intent of a statute, as well as on how an Executive Order is only a piece of paper. Now that we know how little the President values his word and that he is comfortable violating an Executive Order, we are only left to wonder what other secrets are lurking for us in the dark. (The Hill)

Remember, it was abortion that was the very last hurdle that Obama had to jump over to get his power over life and death.
He promised to Federally ban it.
He said Health Care Reform wasn’t tax.
The Stimulus will create 3 Million Jobs. (not “save or create”)
I said at the time he was lying.
I got called a racist so many times I could have paid off my house with the money if I got paid for it.
Saying this President is lying when his lips are moving is like saying the sun will come up tomorrow.
It’s an absolute certainty.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”-Orwell

Thank you, Big Brother and Big Mother and Big Sis… :(
Anyone got a crate of Tea handy… :)

Monday, June 14, 2010

Obama's Crisis Opportunity

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before”. Rahm Emanuel , White House Chief of Staff.
Keep this in mind over the next few months leading up to the November elections.
The Democrats know they have a deadline with destiny so it’s super cram down time.
And what better villain that BP and what better opportunity than the Gulf Oil Spill to push through the stalled Cap and Trade 19th Century “Global Climate Change” Energy program.
Alinsky Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Although it won’t be his main point, President Obama plans to use his Oval Office address Tuesday night, the first of his presidency, to argue for a comprehensive new energy-climate law that goes beyond “spill bill” provisions designed to rein in the oil industry. A Senate Democratic leadership aide tells Playbook that the administration has told Sens. Kerry and Lieberman, who last month introduced an “American Power Act,” that an energy deal MUST include some serious effort to price carbon as a way to slow climate change. “No traditional ‘energy only’ bill meets their sense of what’s credible as a response to BP, or the president’s own 2008 rhetoric,” the official said.
In an Oval Office interview with POLITICO columnist Roger Simon on Friday, the president said: “[I]n the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, indelibly by 9/11. I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come. And one of the biggest leadership challenges for me going forward is going to be to make sure that we draw the right lessons from this disaster and that we move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented — or the kind of visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and has been absent for so long. … [N]ow is the time for us to start making that transition and investing in a new way of doing business when it comes to energy.”
DNC pollster Joel Benenson — in a series of League of Conversation Voters briefings for top Democrats that began Friday and continue this week — is making the case that SWING VOTERS strongly support an aggressive energy/carbon pollution bill. “Making BP Pay Isn’t Enough,” his briefing says. Joel’s recommended “Messaging Architecture”: 1) “Frame the opposition”: “Big Oil and corporate polluters who have blocked energy reform for decades” and “Politicians protecting the special interests that fund their campaigns.” 2) “Illustrate the costs of our dependence: … $1 billion a day on foreign oil … Oil spill destroying jobs and livelihoods.” 3) “Tap into deeply held values: “Put America back in control of our energy situation: Cut foreign oil spending in half. Invest in energy that’s made in America and creates millions of jobs for Americans.” (Politico)
Should be a hell of a Campaign Speech.
Hell for us, the American people, that is.

And then there’s the EPA.
Obama’s stormtroopers for Global Climate Change.
They have assumed the power over every aspect of your life by declaring CO2 a hazard to human life.
So stop exhaling!
12/7/2009: The Environmental Protection Agency formally declared Monday that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels poses a threat to human health and welfare, a designation that set the federal government on the path toward regulating of emissions from power plants, factories, automobiles and other major sources.
Think about that one for a moment.
Power Plants.
That AC you’re running. Imagine if the plant supplying it was forced to go “green” or had massive new oppressive regulations and the cost of it tripled.
That car you drive. What if it was deemed a “health hazard” because it’s emissions are too high or it’s gas mileage is too low. (And that would be the $8 a gallon gas from Obama’s Energy Bill by the way :) )
The products still manufactured in factories, forced to go “green” and the costs go through the roof so they either raise their prices, lay people off, or go overseas.
All on the back of totally junk science, but under the pretext of the Oil Spill.
So break out the battery powered fans, your bike, and some candles, you’ll need them.
Oh, and your taxes are going up! :)
And starting soon the IRS will be in charge of Health Care enforcement of the Mandatory Enrollment.
Don’t worry, be happy.
The Government is here to save you! :)
The Senate just claimed the title of the world’s most delusional body by refusing to strip unelected EPA bureaucrats of the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This was the day freedom died.
One wonders why we have a Congress at all. The 53 profiles in cowardice that could not get a cap-and-tax bill through the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to let the Environmental Protection Agency keep the unprecedented power Congress did not expressly give it. It is power that the EPA arrogated to itself through regulation to control every aspect of the American economy and our very lives.
This country was born over anger at taxation without representation. Regulation without representation may spark another revolt come November. The Tea Party movement began precisely because of such arrogant disregard for the wishes of the American people. Unlike health care reform, this time the cowardly lions of the Senate couldn’t even do it themselves and ceded their authority to the EPA.
It was only a motion to proceed to consideration of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution (S.J. Res. 26) which, under a forgotten provision of the Contract With America, lets legislators veto a “major rule” by any regulatory agency within 60 days of publication. It needed just 51 votes; it got 47.
All 41 Republicans, including newbie Scott Brown of Massachusetts, voted not to shred the Constitution. The motion attracted, for various reasons, the votes of six Democrats — Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, the departing Evan Bayh and even Jay Rockefeller, who for once chose jobs over ideology.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin accused the Republicans of choosing “political science over the real science,” even after the EPA’s junk science based on the manipulation of data by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been exposed as a manufactured fraud.
The case for climate change has collapsed — a fact recognized, finally, by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who, with Democrat John Kerry and independent Joseph Lieberman, once hoped to work out some kind of compromise legislation with a token nod to domestic energy production.
Last week, Graham told reporters he would vote against the climate bill he helped author. “The science about global warming has changed,” Graham told reporters Wednesday on why he was backing an energy bill by Sen. Dick Lugar. “I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question.”
So it’s going to be a long, hot summer.
But at least the government is here to take care of you.
Trust in Big Brother Barack!

Monday, May 10, 2010

Greece-ing The Skids

WASHINGTON (AP) – Your parents were right. Money can’t buy you happiness.
That was the message from the Federal Reserve chairman on Saturday to graduates of the University of South Carolina.

Or was it?

“We all know that getting a better-paying job is one of the main reasons to go to college. … But if you are ever tempted to go into a field or take a job only because the pay is high and for no other reason, be careful!” Ben Bernanke said in his commencement address.
“Having a larger income is exciting at first, but as you get used to your new standard of living and as you associate with other people in your new income bracket, the thrill quickly wears off,” he said.'


Unless you’re a  Liberal that is…
If you’re rich, you’re above it all. But we will demonize only Republicans.
If you’re not, you are told you’re entitled to other people’s money, so don’t worry about it.

But doesn’t this sound a lot like Michelle Obama’s Zanesville speech that got her in so much hot water that she was removed from the campaign trail.
“The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.
“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Collectively, according to the IRS, they made $5 Million Dollars last year.
I guess that wasn’t so evil.
The message, don’t strive so hard to succeed.
Lower your expectations.
Because, we already know we are living so far beyond our means as a government that eventually,  in 10 or 20 years or less you’ll be Greece’d.
So better to lower the expectations now so they can lessen the violence when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.

In Greece:
They are angry because for years they have been encouraged to live beyond their means, taking advantage of the cheap credit on offer since Greece joined the euro in 2001. Now, the rug is being pulled from under their feet. People who have taken out mortgages to buy homes, loans to purchase cars and credit cards to pay for overpriced basic goods are being asked to meet all these commitments with a much lower income than they had budgeted for.

Fannie and Freddie anyone??
UK Guardian: Saddled with burgeoning public sectors (which help sustain muscular trade unions)– SEIU, UAW, NEA anyone?

This is not what angers Greeks most, though. What you will hear time after time, both at the protests and at workplaces and cafes, is that this crisis confirms the failure of the country’s political system. In other words, that for years politicians have been bleeding the country dry, looking after themselves and their friends and failing to build a robust economy and a country equipped to deal with the challenges of the 21st century.

:)
There is anger at the pervasive, high-level corruption for which no politician is ever punished. People are also furious that no government has ever tackled influence-peddling in the public sector. The Greek branch of Transparency International estimated that Greeks paid almost euro800 million ($1 billion) in bribes last year. This is another drain on household budgets but more importantly it creates a sense of injustice, a sense that to get anything done you have to play by the system’s warped rules.
Sound familiar??
This feeling of unfairness is compounded when tax evasion also goes unpunished.
“Turbo Tax” Geithner anyone? Barney Frank? Charlie Rangel??
Salaried professionals and civil servants have their wages taxed at source but many Greeks do not. And, what they declare often bears no resemblance to what they actually earn. The government believes that tax evasion could be worth up to euro30 billion ($38 billion) a year, or 12 percent of the country’s GDP. Allowing one part of the population to consistently get away without paying while Greece’s public finances are propped up by the same people all the time creates incredible resentment. That’s why you hear many Greeks say they will put up with the austerity measures if the government ensures that everybody pays their fair share. If people believe that the usual suspects, who in many cases are wealthy businessmen, doctors and lawyers, are allowed to get away with it, then the level of anger will go up several notches.

47% of all Americans pay NO TAXES whatsover!
Union workers and civil servant can make more in retirement than on the job.
But we aren’t going down that road…oh no…the Nazi, Racist, Violent Tea Baggers are just wrong. :(


Some of the measures imposed on Greece by the EU in order to bail them out (BBC):
The plans hope to achieve budget cuts of 30bn euros over three years – with the goal of cutting Greece’s public deficit to less than 3% of GDP by 2014. It currently stands at 13.6%.
PAY CUTS
The government is planning a freeze pay for all public sector workers.
Some pay cuts will also be implemented, and public sector contract workers are set to lose their jobs.
This follows several years of continuous increases in pay, with salaries rising by an average of 30% since 2006.
Annual bonus payments – paid as 13th and 14th month salaries – will also be scrapped for high earners and capped for lower earners.
Other bonuses will be scrapped.
In the private sector, the legal maximum number of people companies can lay off each month will be doubled from 2% of personnel to 4%.

PENSIONS
The reforms seek to prevent early retirement. Currently the average age of retirement in Greece is 61, though it is not uncommon for public sector workers to retire in their 50s.
Under the planned changes, the retirement age, which is currently 65 years for men and 60 years for women, will be linked to average life expectancy.
In addition, the minimum number of years someone will have had to have worked to qualify for a full pension will rise to 40 years from 37.
Pensions will also be reduced so that they reflect a worker’s average working pay rather than their final salary.
TAX REFORM

VAT will be increased to 23% from 21% – just the latest in a series of recent increases.
Indirect taxes – including those on alcohol, fuel and cigarettes – will see a 10% rise.
There will also be a clamp-down on tax evasion – widely regarded as a big problem in Greece – and on untaxed illegal construction.
Tax-evasion alone is estimated to cost the Greek government at least 20bn euros a year.
PRIVATISATION

In the longer-term, the government will look to reduce the reliance of the Greek economy on the public sector, reducing the number of people on the public payroll.
This will require growth in the private sector, and possible privatisation of some industries.

Getting eerily uncomfortable I hope.
See our future if  Obama and The Democrats (and Republicans too) are not stopped.
According to a December report from the BLS, state and local government employers spent an average of $39.83 per hour worked ($26.24 for wages and $13.60 for benefits) for total employee compensation in September 2009. Total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $27.49 per hour ($19.45 for wages and $8.05 for benefits), see chart above. In other words, government employees make 45% more on average than private sector employees.
According to an analysis by USAToday (thanks to Michael Jahr for the pointer), “The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to an analysis of federal salary data.” For example, the number of federal employees making $100,000 or more has increased by 120,595, from 262,163 employees in December 2007 to 382,758 in June 2009, for a 46% increase. The number of federal workers making $150,000 or more has more than doubled since the recession started, from about 30,000 to more than 66,000 (see chart above).
USA Today also reports that “When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.” That’s a 168,900% increase!!

The Unemployment rate in the public sector is about 3%.
It’s been near 10% for a very long time in the real world.
And do the Democrats look concerned?
Do the Republicans?
Do they?

Josh Barro writes for the Manhattan Institute about the “Two Americas” and the “sharp difference between two classes of employees: those who work in the private sector and those who work for the government. Workers in the public sector have experienced a very different recession from those in the private sector.”
So is this Greece-ing the skids for what the government knows is coming if things don’t change?
I think so.