Real personal income for Americans – excluding government payouts such as Social Security – has fallen by 3.2 percent since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.
For comparison, real personal income during the first 15 months in office for President George W. Bush, who inherited a milder recession from his predecessor, dropped 0.4 percent. Income excluding government payouts increased 12.7 percent during Mr. Bush’s eight years in office.
“This is hardly surprising,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. “Under President Obama, only federal spending is going up; jobs, business startups, and incomes are all down. It is proof that the government can’t spend its way to prosperity.”
According to the bureau’s statistics, per capita income dropped during 2009 in 47 states, with only modest gains in the other states, West Virginia, Maine and Maryland. But most of those increases were attributed to rising income from the government, such as Medicare and unemployment benefits.
And tax hikes are right around the corner, because his massive spending requires it.
Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.
Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.
“These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said. “These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”
Many reports have claimed that enforcement of the individual mandate will be non-existent, but Shulman’s answers indicate differently. According to BusinessWeek, starting in 2015 Americans who don’t purchase insurance will be subject to a fine of $325 and that sum increases to $695 in 2016. However, the commissioner seemed confident that in most cases individuals would either receive subsidies to purchase insurance or simply do so on their own in order to comply with the law.
Here’s my previous story explaining how Obamacare is a bad deal for young men because they are forced to pay for the elderly, who use a lot of health care, and they also have to pay for coverage for treatments they will never need, like breast implants and in vitro and abortions. If you young men, and young people in general who are healthy, don’t want to pay for other people’s abortions, then you can kiss your tax refund goodbye.
…an eye-opening study by the Tax Foundation, a reliable and non-partisan research group, tells us that in 2004, 20 percent of US households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. In other words, one out of five families in America is already government dependent. Another 20 percent were receiving almost 40 percent of their income from federal programs, so another one in five has become government reliant for their livelihood.
All told, 60 percent – three out of five households in America – were receiving more government benefits and services (in dollar value) than they were paying back in taxes. The Tax Foundation estimates that President Obama’s budget last year will raise this “net government inflow” from 60 to 70 percent. Look at it this way: three out of ten American families are supporting themselves plus – through government – supplying or supplementing the incomes of seven other households. As a permanent arrangement, this is individually unfair, politically inequitable, and economically dangerous.
[…]Just to return to where we were at the end of 2007, 8.4 million jobs have to be created. To reduce unemployment to its pre-crisis level of 5 per cent by the end of President Obama’s term, our economy needs to create 247,000 new jobs per month. But we are headed in the wrong direction … except in one field: the government is growing at breakneck pace in expanding federal payrolls.
Although millions of private sector jobs have been lost since the recession began, Washington is on track to add about 275,000 more people to the public payrolls – a whopping 15 percent increase. And we aren’t talking minimum wages here. More federal workers make over $100,000 than those earning $40,000 or less. The average government worker’s salary in 2009 was 21 percent higher than private sector salaries. The average federal worker’s compensation package, including benefits, was nearly $120,000 in 2008, twice the private sector at $60,000. One study shows the private sector benefit package averages $9,900 while the federal package averages almost $41,000. Now the Administration wants Congress to privilege federal workers by writing off their unpaid student loans after ten years. People in productive private sector jobs would keep paying for twenty years. Progressivists would really like everyone to work for the government.
Once you start to pay 50-60 percent of your income to your neighbors who are not working, you don’t try to have a family any more. What is the point? Working harder to provide for them doesn’t get you anything.
WINTERY KNIGHT 