One way to reward your favored special interests is to exempt them from the taxes that everyone else has to pay.

Consider this article from CNS News. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama on Thursday announced a plan to impose a new tax on banks to cover an expected $117 billion shortfall in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The tax would apply to 50 financial institutions, which have assets of more than $50 billion, and would constitute a 0.15 percent tax on the TARP liabilities of these institutions.

However, auto companies General Motors and Chrysler, which are not expected to pay back all of their $66 billion of TARP money, will not be subject to the tax. Also exempted from the tax would be mortgage institutions Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are largely responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008.

What do you suppose that businesses do when the government tells them to pay more taxes? Well, they just pass that on to their consumers.

But there’s more.

Consider this article from the Heritage Foundation. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

After a long-week of negotiations, unions have won an exemption from the excise tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health insurance plans. The excise tax would fall on health insurance plans that cost more than $8,500 for individuals and $23,00 for families (the union deal reportedly slightly increases these thresholds) starting in 2013. It is one of the many tax hikes proposed by Congress to partially offset the cost of its take over of the health care system.

Obama’s union supporters are getting exempted from another tax that will be paid by non-unionized workers.