Story from the center-left Politico.
Excerpt:
The Coakley adviser’s memo: National Dems Failed to Aid Coakley Until Too Late
[…]— From the beginning, Brown labeled President Obama’s health care and cap and trade plans as tax increases. Polling throughout the race showed this to be the most effective attack on Coakley.
There were other policies that hurt Coakley, but this was the most effective.
More here from Gateway Pundit.
Awesome. Just awesome.
Watch this video by libertarian Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. (H/T Power Line via ECM)
I normally don’t like these Dan Mitchell videos, but this one is better than the others I’ve seen at giving you a great introduction to so many useful topics.
The national sales tax would be a GREAT idea, if we went on to remove an equivalent amount of revenue from the income tax. It’s much better to tax consumption than productive work. But that’s not what the Democrats want to do with this value-added tax. They want both income and consumption taxes, so they get a new revenue stream and more money to buy votes from their favorite special interest groups.
Here is a Wall Street Journal article about the Democrats’ proposed VAT.
Excerpt:
The allure of a VAT for politicians is that it applies to every level of production or service, rakes in piles of money, and is largely hidden from those who ultimately pay it—namely, consumers. With a $9 trillion 10-year budget deficit, $4 trillion in spending in fiscal 2010 alone, and a $1 trillion (at a minimum) health-care entitlement in the wings, Mrs. Pelosi knows that not even the revenue from the expiration of the lower Bush tax rates in 2011 will cover the bills. Nearly every European country that has passed national health care has also eventually imposed a VAT, and it’s foolish to think the U.S. will be different.
Tax and spend.
TigerHawk has a post about a tax being considered for medical device companies. (H/T Lex Communis)
Excerpt:
As we have long predicted on this blog, the health care “reformers” propose to finance at least part of the “savings” or new benefits — it is impossible to know which — by decreasing the rate of return on medical technology. There are many ways in which this might be done, but the Senate Democrats are proposing to do so directly, by levying a “value added tax” on medical device companies according to their proportion of U.S. sales. This tax would be without regard to profitability, so it would amount to a capital tax on start-ups and a massive income tax surcharge on profitable companies, varying as net margins do. In the case of my own mid-sized company, the tax would be the equivalent of a roughly 20% surcharge on our net income (in all likelihood raising our economic tax rate well above 50%) or 50% of our research and development budget, depending on how you want to look at it.
Any way you look at it, the proposed tax is a calculated effort to divert capital from the medical technology industry to other uses in the economy, because new medical technology drives costs that are now going to be assumed by the government (or at least will be if the Senate leadership gets its way). Of course, innovative medtech also extends and saves lives, and makes them more comfortable and more productive. Which is, after all, the point of medicine.
Know what would be great? If a bunch of silver-spoon bureaucrats invented something that might actually save lives instead of meddling in the financial affairs of medical innovators.
Some of the companies that would be affected are listed in this Wall Street Journal article.
WINTERY KNIGHT 