Editorial Exegesis: "President Obama unveiled part two of his American Jobs Act on Monday, and it turns out to be another permanent increase in taxes to pay for more spending and another temporary tax cut. No surprise there. What might surprise Americans, however, is how the President is setting up the U.S. economy for one of the biggest tax increases in history in 2013.
Upright: "When President Obama outlined his $450 billion jobs plan in a speech before Congress last week, he promised it would all be 'paid for,' and assured us he would present another plan outlining how he planned to do so. ... So much for the 'balanced approach' Obama was so fond of during the debt ceiling debate.
Essential Liberty: Point: "Many people think that when the government takes payroll tax from their paychecks, it goes to something like a savings account. Seniors who collect Social Security think they're just getting back money that they put into their 'account.' Or they think it's like an insurance policy -- you win if you live long enough to get more than you paid in. Neither is true.
The Demo-gogues: Broken record: "This is the bill that Congress needs to pass. ... No games. No politics. No delays." --Barack Obama, gamer and hardball politico. From the campaigner in chief: "[M]y job as president of the United States is not to worry about my job." --Barack Obama, who plans to spend $1 billion campaigning to keep his job
FULL ARTICLES: http://patriotpost.us/edition/2011/09/14/chronicle/
Showing posts with label raise taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raise taxes. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
THE HILL: Obama to Congress: Tax rich Americans to pay for $447B jobs-creation bill
By Sam Youngman - 09/12/11
President Obama demanded on Monday that Congress pay for his $447 billion jobs bill with higher taxes on the rich and businesses.
The tax proposals, which have all previously been advocated by Obama, underline the White House’s political agenda for the fall, which increasingly is focused on setting up congressional Republicans as foils on the economy during the 2012 presidential race.
Few, if any, of the proposed tax hikes have any chance of being approved by the Republican-held House, but they all could help the White House frame the GOP as protecting Wall Street money mangers and corporate interests at the expense of the middle class.
At the same time, the attacks on the rich open Obama up to new charges of class warfare, not only from Congress, but from the Republicans campaigning to replace him.
CONTINUE READING:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/181081-obama-tax-the-rich-to-pay-for-the-jobs-bill
President Obama demanded on Monday that Congress pay for his $447 billion jobs bill with higher taxes on the rich and businesses.
The tax proposals, which have all previously been advocated by Obama, underline the White House’s political agenda for the fall, which increasingly is focused on setting up congressional Republicans as foils on the economy during the 2012 presidential race.
Few, if any, of the proposed tax hikes have any chance of being approved by the Republican-held House, but they all could help the White House frame the GOP as protecting Wall Street money mangers and corporate interests at the expense of the middle class.
At the same time, the attacks on the rich open Obama up to new charges of class warfare, not only from Congress, but from the Republicans campaigning to replace him.
CONTINUE READING:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/181081-obama-tax-the-rich-to-pay-for-the-jobs-bill
Friday, October 8, 2010
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.”
Ten Tax Increases of Obamacare
By Avik Roy, in National Review, Oct. 5, 2010
http://www.nationalreview.com/critical-condition/248846/ten-tax-increases-obamacare-avik-roy
Bob Vineyard of InsureBlog calls our attention to a piece in the Kiplinger letters on “thirteen tax changes on the way” due to PPACA (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare”). Describing them as “changes” is charmingly sunny, given that only two of the changes are tax credits―a fancy term for subsidies―whereas ten are tax increases: levies intended to help raise the trillions of dollars necessary to fund these very tax credits, along with the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid. (One of the changes Kiplinger lists is technically neither a tax increase nor a credit, but is designed to enhance enforcement of the tax increases. More on that later.)
In keeping with the spirit with which PPACA was written, let’s focus first on dessert (the subsidies) and then the spinach (the increases). Employers with 25 or fewer employees and average annual wages less than $50,000 are eligible for tax credits for up to 35 percent of their health insurance costs through 2013; for 2014 and 2015, these firms can gain a credit of up to 50 percent of their insurance costs if they enroll in the PPACA-sponsored state-based exchanges. The other tax credit listed by Kiplinger is more directly a subsidy: available on a sliding scale to individuals with incomes between $11,000 and $44,000 ($22,000 and $88,000 for families), for purchasing health insurance.
Here are the ten tax increases:
1. A 10% excise tax on indoor tanning services (a boon to beach towns everywhere).
2. Elimination of the tax deduction for employers providing Medicare prescription drug coverage. (This is a big part of why companies like 3M are dropping health coverage for their retirees.)
3. Doubling the penalty for spending money from your tax-free health savings account for non-health-related purposes (as defined by PPACA), to 20%.
4. Capping the amount that employers can contribute to your tax-free flexible spending accounts (employer-sponsored HSAs), at $2,500 a year (it was previously limited by your employer’s generosity).
5. Banning the use of funds from HSAs and related accounts for the purchase of over-the-counter medications (now you will have to go to your doctor and get a prescription, a waste of precious health-care resources and doctors’ time).
6. A 0.9% Medicare surtax to wages over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples, along with a 3.8% Medicare tax on investment income of these individuals. (The 3.8% tax will actually apply to the lesser of unearned income or any excess income above $200,000/$250,000.) Because this tax is applied to pre-tax income, these taxes are equivalent to income tax rate increases of 2 percent and 8 percent respectively.
7. The ability to deduct itemized medical expenses will begin after you spend 10% of your income on medical expenses, instead of 7.5%.
8. The employer mandate, which requires that all business with more than 50 employees offer PPACA-approved health plans to all of their employees, or pay a tax of $2,000 per employee, excluding the first 30 employees.
9. The “Cadillac tax” on high-value health plans: beginning in 2018, plans costing more than $10,200 for individuals, or $27,500 for families, will be assessed a 40 percent excise tax. Insofar as this tax mimics the elimination of the employer tax exclusion , it is the least offensive of Obamacare’s tax increases, but unfortunately that policy goal―harmonizing the tax treatment of individually-purchased and employer-sponsored health insurance―is neutered by the employer mandate described above.
10. And last, but not least: the individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance, or pay a tax: it starts in 2014 at $95 or 1% of gross income, whichever is greater; and maxes out in 2016 at the greater of $695 or 2.5% of income.
Importantly, Kiplinger’s run-down overlooks PPACA’s numerous tax increases on health care businesses, as well as its thousands of mandates that will increase the cost of health care and labor, all of which will be passed down to consumers in the form of higher costs for everything from cancer drugs to Big Macs.
For example, the $2.5 billion excise tax on pharmaceutical companies will simply get passed onto consumers: companies will charge $7-8 billion more for their products, in order to recover the income lost to the excise tax. Similar taxes on medical devices and health insurance will be passed onto consumers. And whether your local McDonald’s franchise chooses to offer generous health insurance to all of its employees, or instead pays the new tax for failing to do so, the cost of your Happy Meal is going up.
Kiplinger’s 13th “change” is genuinely a change: employers will now be required to disclose on your W-2s the amount they spend on your health insurance, so as to ensure enforcement of the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the Cadillac tax.
There’s another change that Kiplinger neglects to mention, but that Bob Vineyard does: the requirement that businesses fill out an IRS Form 1099 every time they spend more than $600 on a single vendor in a calendar year. The increased compliance burdens associated with this rule are staggering, and once again will drive up the cost of everything you buy. As Bob Vineyard puts it:
Business owners are required to generate a 1099 for any vendor where they purchase more than $600 in goods or services. That means if you own a business and buy more than $600 in gasoline, electricity, telephone, internet, cell phone, natural gas or water you must generate a 1099 for those businesses. Buy more than $600 from Office Depot or Staples?
Generate a 1099.
Do you pay a cleaning service to empty the trash in your business? Pay a landscaper? Provide a coffee service for employees and guests? 1099. 1099, 1099.
It will cost you money to generate those 1099′s. Money that could have been used to create jobs.
Advocates of PPACA truly believed that Obamacare would become more popular as people came to appreciate the ways in which the law directly benefited them. But P. J. O’Rourke’s immortal aphorism can’t be too often repeated: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.”
By Avik Roy, in National Review, Oct. 5, 2010
http://www.nationalreview.com/critical-condition/248846/ten-tax-increases-obamacare-avik-roy
Bob Vineyard of InsureBlog calls our attention to a piece in the Kiplinger letters on “thirteen tax changes on the way” due to PPACA (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare”). Describing them as “changes” is charmingly sunny, given that only two of the changes are tax credits―a fancy term for subsidies―whereas ten are tax increases: levies intended to help raise the trillions of dollars necessary to fund these very tax credits, along with the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid. (One of the changes Kiplinger lists is technically neither a tax increase nor a credit, but is designed to enhance enforcement of the tax increases. More on that later.)
In keeping with the spirit with which PPACA was written, let’s focus first on dessert (the subsidies) and then the spinach (the increases). Employers with 25 or fewer employees and average annual wages less than $50,000 are eligible for tax credits for up to 35 percent of their health insurance costs through 2013; for 2014 and 2015, these firms can gain a credit of up to 50 percent of their insurance costs if they enroll in the PPACA-sponsored state-based exchanges. The other tax credit listed by Kiplinger is more directly a subsidy: available on a sliding scale to individuals with incomes between $11,000 and $44,000 ($22,000 and $88,000 for families), for purchasing health insurance.
Here are the ten tax increases:
1. A 10% excise tax on indoor tanning services (a boon to beach towns everywhere).
2. Elimination of the tax deduction for employers providing Medicare prescription drug coverage. (This is a big part of why companies like 3M are dropping health coverage for their retirees.)
3. Doubling the penalty for spending money from your tax-free health savings account for non-health-related purposes (as defined by PPACA), to 20%.
4. Capping the amount that employers can contribute to your tax-free flexible spending accounts (employer-sponsored HSAs), at $2,500 a year (it was previously limited by your employer’s generosity).
5. Banning the use of funds from HSAs and related accounts for the purchase of over-the-counter medications (now you will have to go to your doctor and get a prescription, a waste of precious health-care resources and doctors’ time).
6. A 0.9% Medicare surtax to wages over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples, along with a 3.8% Medicare tax on investment income of these individuals. (The 3.8% tax will actually apply to the lesser of unearned income or any excess income above $200,000/$250,000.) Because this tax is applied to pre-tax income, these taxes are equivalent to income tax rate increases of 2 percent and 8 percent respectively.
7. The ability to deduct itemized medical expenses will begin after you spend 10% of your income on medical expenses, instead of 7.5%.
8. The employer mandate, which requires that all business with more than 50 employees offer PPACA-approved health plans to all of their employees, or pay a tax of $2,000 per employee, excluding the first 30 employees.
9. The “Cadillac tax” on high-value health plans: beginning in 2018, plans costing more than $10,200 for individuals, or $27,500 for families, will be assessed a 40 percent excise tax. Insofar as this tax mimics the elimination of the employer tax exclusion , it is the least offensive of Obamacare’s tax increases, but unfortunately that policy goal―harmonizing the tax treatment of individually-purchased and employer-sponsored health insurance―is neutered by the employer mandate described above.
10. And last, but not least: the individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance, or pay a tax: it starts in 2014 at $95 or 1% of gross income, whichever is greater; and maxes out in 2016 at the greater of $695 or 2.5% of income.
Importantly, Kiplinger’s run-down overlooks PPACA’s numerous tax increases on health care businesses, as well as its thousands of mandates that will increase the cost of health care and labor, all of which will be passed down to consumers in the form of higher costs for everything from cancer drugs to Big Macs.
For example, the $2.5 billion excise tax on pharmaceutical companies will simply get passed onto consumers: companies will charge $7-8 billion more for their products, in order to recover the income lost to the excise tax. Similar taxes on medical devices and health insurance will be passed onto consumers. And whether your local McDonald’s franchise chooses to offer generous health insurance to all of its employees, or instead pays the new tax for failing to do so, the cost of your Happy Meal is going up.
Kiplinger’s 13th “change” is genuinely a change: employers will now be required to disclose on your W-2s the amount they spend on your health insurance, so as to ensure enforcement of the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the Cadillac tax.
There’s another change that Kiplinger neglects to mention, but that Bob Vineyard does: the requirement that businesses fill out an IRS Form 1099 every time they spend more than $600 on a single vendor in a calendar year. The increased compliance burdens associated with this rule are staggering, and once again will drive up the cost of everything you buy. As Bob Vineyard puts it:
Business owners are required to generate a 1099 for any vendor where they purchase more than $600 in goods or services. That means if you own a business and buy more than $600 in gasoline, electricity, telephone, internet, cell phone, natural gas or water you must generate a 1099 for those businesses. Buy more than $600 from Office Depot or Staples?
Generate a 1099.
Do you pay a cleaning service to empty the trash in your business? Pay a landscaper? Provide a coffee service for employees and guests? 1099. 1099, 1099.
It will cost you money to generate those 1099′s. Money that could have been used to create jobs.
Advocates of PPACA truly believed that Obamacare would become more popular as people came to appreciate the ways in which the law directly benefited them. But P. J. O’Rourke’s immortal aphorism can’t be too often repeated: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free.”
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
ACTION ALERT…
"Sell Your Home Before 2013″ it’s in the healthcare bill
REAL ESTATE SALES TAX TO GO INTO EFFECT 2013 (Part of HC Bill)
So, this is "change you can believe in"?
Under the new health care bill - did you know that all real estate transactions will be subject to a 3.8% Sales Tax? The bulk of these new taxes don't kick in until 2013 (presumably after obama’s re-election). You can thank Nancy ,
Harry and Barack and your local Democrat Congressman for this one. If you sell your $400,000 home, there will be a $15,200 tax. This bill is set to screw the retiring generation who often downsize their homes.
Is this Hope & Change great or what? Does this stuff makes your November and 2012 votes more important?
Oh, you weren't aware this was in the obamacare bill? Guess what, you aren't alone. There are more than a few members of Congress that aren't aware of it either (result of clandestine midnight voting for huge bills they've never read).
AND,
there are a few other surprises lurking.
REAL ESTATE SALES TAX TO GO INTO EFFECT 2013 (Part of HC Bill)
So, this is "change you can believe in"?
Under the new health care bill - did you know that all real estate transactions will be subject to a 3.8% Sales Tax? The bulk of these new taxes don't kick in until 2013 (presumably after obama’s re-election). You can thank Nancy ,
Harry and Barack and your local Democrat Congressman for this one. If you sell your $400,000 home, there will be a $15,200 tax. This bill is set to screw the retiring generation who often downsize their homes.
Is this Hope & Change great or what? Does this stuff makes your November and 2012 votes more important?
Oh, you weren't aware this was in the obamacare bill? Guess what, you aren't alone. There are more than a few members of Congress that aren't aware of it either (result of clandestine midnight voting for huge bills they've never read).
AND,
there are a few other surprises lurking.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Morning Bell:
Labor Day Has Become Government Day
This Labor Day marks a milestone in the history of the U.S. union movement. It is the first Labor Day on which a majority of union members in United States work for the government. In January the Department of Labor reported that union membership in government has overtaken that in the private sector. Three times as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry. The face of the union movement is not a worker on the assembly line but a clerk at the DMV.
This is a dramatic shift for the union movement. The early trade unionists did not believe that unions had a place in government. They believed the purpose of unions was to redistribute business profits from owners to workers … and the government makes no profits. Not until the 1960s did unionizing government employees become widespread. Now government employees make up 52 percent of all union members.
So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t.
Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart the labor movement’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. But if a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much of the profits, then that firm will be unable to reinvest those resources and will lose out to competitors. But when a union extracts a generous contract from a government, there is no check on that spending. Instead of being forced out by more efficient competitors, the government just raises taxes.
The shift from private to public sector has fundamentally changed organized labor’s priorities. Unions used to support policies that would help their private sector employers grow. But now that they are largely dependent on the government, the only growth that unions are interested in is the growth of government. So unions push for tax increases across the country. Consider recent union activism:
•Illinois. Unions want state lawmakers to increase the state income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and to expand the sales tax to cover some services. In April 2010 they organized rallies of government workers outside the state capitol shouting “Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes!” At that rally, a government union member was caught on camera chanting “Where’s the money?” and “Give up the bucks!”
•Montana. The Montana teachers union openly sees itself as a supporter of tax and spend politics. Its President boasts, “Were it not for us almost any one of the … anti-tax and spend ballot issues proposed in the last 25 years would have passed.”
•New Mexico. Unions lobbied the state’s legislature to raise taxes to deal with its budget deficit. The union got its wish, but it was not the wealthy who paid – the legislature imposed a 2 percent sales tax on food.
•Washington state. Washington state has no income tax, and unions want to change that. They have placed an initiative on the November ballot creating a state income tax and are among the top donors to the campaign to pass it.
Government unions are the backbone of the Obama dependency economy. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize union campaigns, much less those that call for tax increases. At the very least Congress should end the automatic payroll deduction of union dues.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/09/06/morning-bell-labor-day-has-become-government-day/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning+Bell
This Labor Day marks a milestone in the history of the U.S. union movement. It is the first Labor Day on which a majority of union members in United States work for the government. In January the Department of Labor reported that union membership in government has overtaken that in the private sector. Three times as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry. The face of the union movement is not a worker on the assembly line but a clerk at the DMV.
This is a dramatic shift for the union movement. The early trade unionists did not believe that unions had a place in government. They believed the purpose of unions was to redistribute business profits from owners to workers … and the government makes no profits. Not until the 1960s did unionizing government employees become widespread. Now government employees make up 52 percent of all union members.
So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t.
Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart the labor movement’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. But if a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much of the profits, then that firm will be unable to reinvest those resources and will lose out to competitors. But when a union extracts a generous contract from a government, there is no check on that spending. Instead of being forced out by more efficient competitors, the government just raises taxes.
The shift from private to public sector has fundamentally changed organized labor’s priorities. Unions used to support policies that would help their private sector employers grow. But now that they are largely dependent on the government, the only growth that unions are interested in is the growth of government. So unions push for tax increases across the country. Consider recent union activism:
•Illinois. Unions want state lawmakers to increase the state income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and to expand the sales tax to cover some services. In April 2010 they organized rallies of government workers outside the state capitol shouting “Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes!” At that rally, a government union member was caught on camera chanting “Where’s the money?” and “Give up the bucks!”
•Montana. The Montana teachers union openly sees itself as a supporter of tax and spend politics. Its President boasts, “Were it not for us almost any one of the … anti-tax and spend ballot issues proposed in the last 25 years would have passed.”
•New Mexico. Unions lobbied the state’s legislature to raise taxes to deal with its budget deficit. The union got its wish, but it was not the wealthy who paid – the legislature imposed a 2 percent sales tax on food.
•Washington state. Washington state has no income tax, and unions want to change that. They have placed an initiative on the November ballot creating a state income tax and are among the top donors to the campaign to pass it.
Government unions are the backbone of the Obama dependency economy. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize union campaigns, much less those that call for tax increases. At the very least Congress should end the automatic payroll deduction of union dues.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/09/06/morning-bell-labor-day-has-become-government-day/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning+Bell
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