Tag Archives: Billion

News

Democrat health care bill requires 600 billion dollar tax hike

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Welcome visitors from 4Simpsons! Thanks for the link Neil!

Bloomberg reports:

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

…That won’t be enough to cover the overhaul costs. Obama said this week he plans in the coming days to disclose more proposals for raising “additional sources of revenue.” In a letter last week to Senate Democrats drafting legislation he said he will be proposing between $200 billion and $300 billion in further Medicare and Medicaid cuts.

If you think that tax hikes on “the rich” won’t affect you, you’re naive. The rich are the people you work for. If Obama starts confiscating your money, they will ship your job overseas where taxes are lower. That’s just the way it is. The most productive people in the world are not just going to hand over their money to Obama to redistribute to unions, bureaucrats, the United Nations, ACORN and Planned Parenthood.

Stem cells in India

Meanwhile, here is a neat health care story so you will know where to go for medical treatment (India) after Obama tells you that you will have to wait two years behind people who voted for him.

“It was the first time in eastern India that such a transplant was being performed on a child,” he said….Pramita’s bone marrow, which contain stem cells, was collected from her spinal cord. It was successfully transplanted in her body in April 2009. The entire process took two months during which she was kept isolated in a sterilised room with high efficient particulate air (HEPA) filter. “We will do a follow-up on her health for the next six months since she may contract infection during this period and so has to follow some restrictions. But after that she can lead a normal life and can resume her dance lessons without any problem,” Dr. Mukhopadhyay said.

For more on stem cell research, see this post.

News

Evaluating Democrat policies on the budget, health care and cap and trade

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A Harvard economist says that tax hikes will kill the recovery: (H/T John Boehner, Mike Pence)

Harvard economist Martin Feldstein writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Even if the proposed tax increases are not scheduled to take effect until 2011, households will recognize the permanent reduction in their future incomes and will reduce current spending accordingly.  Higher future tax rates on capital gains and dividends will depress share prices immediately and the resulting fall in wealth will cut consumer spending further.  Lower share prices will also raise the cost of equity capital, depressing business investment in plant and equipment.

Tax hikes for the poor:

Mr. Obama’s biggest proposed tax increase is the cap-and-trade system of requiring businesses to buy carbon dioxide emission permits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the proposed permit auctions would raise about $80 billion a year and that these extra taxes would be passed along in higher prices to consumers. Anyone who drives a car, uses public transportation, consumes electricity or buys any product that involves creating CO2 in its production would face higher prices…

But while the cap-and-trade tax rises with income, the relative burden is greatest for low-income households. According to the CBO, households in the lowest-income quintile spend more than 20% of their income on energy intensive items (primarily fuels and electricity), while those in the highest-income quintile spend less than 5% on those products.

Bye-bye, American manufacturing sector. Or maybe Obama will nationalize the entire industry, who can say? He’s already practically doing it now.

Remember the no tax increases pledge that Obama made? Kevin Boland writes:

If you drive a car or flip on a light switch – Democrats have a new national energy tax for you.  If you’re a small business owner or if you’re employed by one – Democrats have a new tax for you.  If you’re a charity – Democrats have a new tax for your donors.  If you’re looking to produce more American energy – Democrats have a new tax for you.  If you own stock – Democrats have a new tax for you.  And when you’re finally able to relax – after paying all your taxes to Uncle Sam – and you want to kick back, relax, and have a cold beer, you guessed it, Democrats may have a new tax for you too.

USA Today asks where the promised fiscal restraint of Mr. ACORN lawyer has gone off to. (H/T Mike Pence)

When it comes to federal spending, there’s a pattern emerging with President Obama, and it’s not a flattering one. The president says all the right things about the importance of getting the deficit under control, but his actions don’t come close to matching his rhetoric.

An early sign of the disconnect was his heavily publicized demand last month that his Cabinet secretaries shave $100 million from their administrative budgets. Obama said the cuts would “send a signal that we are serious about how government operates” and would help close the “confidence gap” with skeptical Americans. Those cuts amounted to a less-than-confidence-inspiring 0.003% of the 2009 budget, or about 3 cents out of every $1,000.

Then, when he unveiled his 2010 budget last week, Obama made a big deal of his demand for $17 billion in cuts, insisting that the cuts “even by Washington standards … are significant” and that $17 billion is “real money.”

The president got it backward. Out in the rest of the world, $17 billion is a ton of money. But in Washington, where the president is proposing to spend $3.6 trillion next year, $17 billion looks puny – a little less than half a percent of the budget, or the equivalent of cutting a $100 grocery bill by handing back a 50-cent pack of gum.

Anybody who read David Freddoso’s book or looked up Obama’s voting record could have known that his rhetoric was just lies for the gullible.

Over to the health care issue, where John Shadegg explains how capitalism is the right way to reduce health care costs.

President Obama’s pledge to work with health care providers and insurers to scale back costs misses the entire point: health care costs are so high because we are not giving patients choice and forcing insurers to compete.  We need robust market reforms – not symbolic gestures.  The way to lower prices is to put control in the hands of patients.  We need to empower Americans by giving them the freedom to either keep their employer plan or purchase the plan of their choice through a tax credit.  Choice and competition will drive prices down and quality up.

Shadegg goes on to explain why the Obama plan does none of this. And why should it? We already know that the Democrats want private health care to fail, so they can usher in single-payer health care. (Just they want private industry to fail so they can nationalize more of the free market)

Putting 120 million Americans on government coverage will create a monopoly that sends costs skyrocketing. Choice will be lost because the enormous government-run plan will put the private plans out of business.  In other words, if you like what you have, you will lose it.  And while health insurance will be provided, health care will not – like every nationalized health plan across the world, as costs escalate, care will be slashed, patients waitlisted, drugs denied.

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann notes the looming entitlement crisis is now closer than ever, with the Medicare insolvency date moving earlier.

Yesterday, the Medicare and Social Security Trustees issued a new report that laid out unequivocally that our current Medicare and Social Security programs are on a path for financial implosion and are in need of serious reform.

In fact, the Medicare insolvency date has moved up to 2017.  And, that doesn’t include the impact of the so-called “stimulus” bill, which could accelerate insolvency by about 6 months.

And, we’re facing a strain on Social Security like never before, with nearly 80 million retiring Baby Boomers tapping into the funds soon we’ll be spending more to pay benefits than what the system receives in payroll taxes. Yet, we continue to carry on with the status quo, every now and then saying that we need to reform it, but not actually doing anything about it.

Michele is trying to do something about it, but the House is filled with Democrats who never ran a business in their entire lives.

I’ve introduced the Truth In Accounting Act to make government finances truly transparent and open.  Not only would financial commitments be crystal clear to Congress, but also to the taxpayers.

Currently, when Congress and the President prepare budget proposals and pass spending bills, they have the luxury of ignoring shortfalls year after year.  They prepare, present, and approve budgets which project these estimates over the short-term – usually five or ten years.  And, there are a lot of things that can be done on paper to paper over the long-term shortfalls.

My Truth in Accounting Act would require the President to consider these long-term shortfalls when he proposes his budget.  And, it would require both the GAO (Government Accountability Office) and the U.S. Treasury to report this information to the Congress so that the numbers can be used when we’re finalizing the annual budget.

Furthermore, my legislation would require that the report be translated into easily comprehensible terms so that nothing could be hidden by complex jargon.  The government’s fiscal imbalance would be presented in the whole, and as distributed per person, per worker, and per household.

I hope she is somehow able to pass this bill.

News

Are Obama’s bailouts just pay-offs to left-wing special interest groups?

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We looked at whether Al Gore’s global warming alarmism was just a scam to increase his already considerable wealth by misleading people desperate to find meaning in life with a bunch of faith-based lies. This time, let’s take a look at Obama’s bailout activities and see whether the the bailouts are to stimulate the economy, or to reward people who voted for him.

For instance, California recently cut $74 million from its state budget by lowering the salaries of unionized workers. How did Obama respond? By threatening to withhold stimulus money unless the unions got the money back.

The radically leftist Los Angeles Times has the story. (H/T Hot Air)

Reporting from Sacramento — The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Schwarzenegger’s office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials. …

The wages at issue involve workers who care for some 440,000 low-income disabled and elderly Californians. The workers, who collectively contribute millions of dollars in dues each month to the influential Service Employees International Union and the United Domestic Workers, will see the state’s contribution to their wages cut from a maximum of $12.10 per hour to a maximum of $10.10.

And we know from Michelle Malkin that Obama is pressuring private companies to shaft their shareholders in order to give his union buddies a better deal than they deserve.

Greed is good – until it gets in the way of a union-friendly restructuring deal. President Obama, generous recipient of Wall Street largesse, angrily derided a group of hedge fund managers this week as “speculators.” The miffed president suggested that uncooperative firms were selfish for holding out on the government’s Chrysler bankruptcy plans and refusing to make “sacrifices” to benefit the United Auto Workers.

The “sacrifices” involved Chrysler debt holders agreeing to sell the debt to the government at prices determined by union-beholden bureaucrats instead of bankruptcy courts. The hedge firms balked. Obama sneered that the dissenters were looking for “unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.” But the holdouts never took banking bailout funds from Washington. And the targeted financial executives were simply doing what good money managers are supposed to do: put their clients’ fiduciary interests first.

Michelle Malkin also reports on how Obama wants another $19 billion for his peeps at Fanie Mae. Remember, democrats caused this recession by forcing banks via regulations to make loans to Democrat voters against all common sense. Obama gets happy leftist feelings of superiority by redistributing wealth from the producers to the victims. And he thinks that if you went to expensive private schools and Harvard thanks to a rich grandmother, then you would feel good about him redistributing your money, too.

The story from Yahoo News Michelle links to says:

Fannie Mae (FNM.P), the largest provider of U.S. home mortgage funding, said on Friday it needs more capital from the U.S. Treasury after a $23.2 billion loss in the first quarter, and warned government housing programs would cut deeper into its profitability.

The government-controlled company said its regulator requested $19 billion from the Treasury under a funding commitment that on Wednesday was doubled to $200 billion. The credit, in the form of senior preferred stock purchases, was established as soaring losses led the government to push the company into conservatorship in September.

As the nation’s housing market reels in its worst downturn since the 1930s, credit-related expenses accounted for the majority of Fannie Mae’s loss, at $20.9 billion. It also took a $5.7 billion loss on mortgage securities.

Provisions for credit losses soared 85 percent as the U.S. economy faltered, expanding delinquencies — which have wreaked havoc on the entire financial system — to consumers with better credit, it said.

Oh, and here is news of a prospective bailout of Obama’s buddies in the left wing media.

Inquisitr.com and Free Republic reported: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

At the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington DC Saturday evening (May 9), President Barack Obama ended on a serious note, pledging his undying support for journalists and specifically newspapers.

President Obama spoke about media job losses and changes in the industry, then quoted Jefferson, “if he had the choice between Government with newspapers or newspapers without Government, he’d choose the latter.” The gushing was perhaps understandable at a press function, but it’s what he said next that foretold of a newspaper bailout.

Obama told the crowd “Your ultimate success is essential to success of our democracy” before shortly saying “Government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America.”

The notable thing in context is that Obama primarily in the speech talks about newspapers, with other media outlets being mentioned second (collectively), or when making a joke (for example, noting that Jefferson hadn’t seen Cable News.) It would appear from the speech clearly that Obama holds the mainstream media, and particularly newspapers above online media. It is clear that when he talked about “tough and vibrant media” that he is referring to mainstream media, and newspapers in particular.

He concludes with the line that the problems in the media industry are “problems worth solving,” which sounds an awful lot like the final word that there’s going to be a newspaper bailout.

And remember I blogged recently about Michele Bachmann’s effort to prevent taxpayer money from going to ACORN while they are facing criminal charges.

It’s like Bush and Haliburton. Only that Bush stuff never actually happened, but this Democrat stuff is actually happening. Everything the Democrats hated about Bush? Like opposing dissent and free speech? Bush never did any of it. Democrats are the ones who are authoring hate crime bills and criminalizing blogging. Yeah, fascism is a solely a phenomenon of the left. Always has been, always will be.