In a desperate scramble to balance their state budgets, state legislators in many states have seized upon the idea of “increasing revenue” (read: raising taxes) rather than taking actions to live within their means. Whether it’s:
- Expanding communications taxes in California;
- Arguing in New York that a store does not have to be in the state at all to levy taxes; or,
- Florida urging the passage of federal legislation to “enable states to collect Internet sales taxes” before the state does its assigned work.
The goal of all is to get more money to spend—and they want it now.
Let’s take Florida. Years ago the U.S. Supreme Court said that states are able to force merchants to collect and remit sales taxes for goods sold to state residents (as they do today for purchases made in the state). Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed published in American Spectator online, Peter Ferrara warns against the coming rationing of health care.
An excerpt: “Buried in Barack Obama's so-called stimulus bill is funding for a bureaucratic structure for the government to begin rationing the health care of the American people. A centralized government bureaucracy would be established that would ultimately have the power to decide what health care you can have, and when, especially when it involves highly expensive, advanced medical care for the seriously ill. Unless this is stopped, many of you reading this article right now will one day suffer death-by-liberalism, when the government bureaucracy decides that the health care you need is not worth the cost, or puts you in a waiting line where death will arrive before treatment. Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed featured today in Forbes.com, IPI senior fellow George Pieler and International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens F. Laurson write:
“Can you stimulate the economy by shutting out foreign workers? Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley think so. And for all his anti-protectionist rhetoric, President Obama has shown surprisingly little interest in stopping them.
The stimulus bill the president signed into law restricts the use of bank bailout funds (money banks get from the Financial Stability Plan, formerly known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program) to hire skilled foreign workers under the H-1B visa program… Read More...
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Can’t Figure Out Your Taxes? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says you’re apparently not alone...
Rep. Charlie Rangel, who heads Congress’ tax-writing committee, was recently exposed for not paying $11,000 in taxes on rental income from his Caribbean resort home.
The new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, just paid the payroll taxes on past income that he had ignored for years.
And the former leader of Senate Democrats, Tom Daschle, recently forked over $140,000 in taxes and interest for using a donated car he never claimed as income.
All of these men claim it’s just an innocent oversight or mistake. But even if that’s true, doesn’t it mean it’s time to simplify our tax system? If the people who sit over the rest of us can’t get their taxes right, how can we expect average Americans to? Read More...
 Paying Taxes |
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In a brand new op/ed published in the Detroit News, Doug Bandow writes:
When God gets tossed around in politics, Americans usually think of conservative evangelicals pushing hot-button issues like restrictions on abortion. But a December interfaith gathering of Metro Detroiters made it clear that the Almighty gets carried across all ideological lines.
Former Detroit Cardinal Adam Maida gathered 11 congregations in Detroit -- Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian -- to promote passage of the then-pending auto industry bailout bill in Congress. Representing a parts supplier, James Settles asked congregants at a Detroit church "to continue your prayers, so we can see a miracle.”… Read More...
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We thought we should highlight a recent USA Today story because, well, the public needs to know … and the politicians are trying to ignore it.
Millions of Americans are already concerned about the future of Social Security and Medicare—as well they should. According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports, Social Security’s unfunded liabilities was an estimated $15.8 trillion in 2008, and $86 trillion for Medicare. That’s a total of $101.7 trillion (in today’s dollars) for both programs.
Yes, that’s “trillion” with a “T.”
Now USA Today tells us that states have retiree health care obligations totaling about $445 billion. Not all states, however. Read More...
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It’s been six years since the Legislature reformed the homeowners (part of the property and casualty, or P&C) insurance market.
As a result of those reforms, rates decreased by 13.5 percent between 2003 and 2006, excluding State Farm, the state’s largest P&C insurer; and they decreased by 2.7 percent including State Farm, according to the Texas Department of Insurance, and cited in the Dallas Morning News.
More companies and policies to choose from and lower prices! That’s a success story.
And yet there’s growling from the “watchdogs” (the media euphemism for organizations that never seem to actually produce anything people want to buy). They want to force insurers to get approval for rate hikes before they take place.
When it comes to insurance premiums, Texas has a price controls-lite system. Read More...
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The growing incidence of calls for government meddling and control of speech is staggering.
- Last week former President Clinton opined on a radio show that government must do something to balance opinions in broadcasting;
- Acting Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Copps complained a few years ago that he couldn’t find any “quality” on television;
- Liberal Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has asserted that media reform needs to now be pushed with a “progressive” agenda;
- And then there’s the reported meetings between the FCC and the chairman of its oversight committee, the liberal Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), to discuss ways to enact so-called “Fairness Doctrine” polices.
The concern underlying their arguments? Something called “spectrum scarcity.”
Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed published in American Spectator online, Peter Ferrara discusses the new welfare ‘un-reforms’ included in the stimulus bill.
An excerpt: “Sweeping, historic, welfare reforms were enacted in 1996, led by the Republican congressional majorities at the time, with strong, bipartisan support. The reforms involved the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), originally adopted during the New Deal. The federal funds for the program were sent back to each state with the funds to be used for a new welfare program designed by each state based on mandatory work for the able bodied…” Read More...
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A recent report released by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force finds that when it comes to protecting children online, there is no technological substitute for the role of law enforcement and parents in keeping society safe.
To watch the final report of the Task Force online, click here.
Presenters of the final report include IPI’s Bartlett Cleland, John Palfrey of Harvard University’s Berkman Center, Aristotle’s Blair Richardson, and ConnectSafely.org’s Anne Collier. IPI served as a member to the Task Force and contributed to the final report. Read More...
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It is now officially President Barack Obama’s economy.
In his first press conference, the president made it clear that the economic slowdown wasn’t his doing. He inherited it from President Bush. Fair enough.
But Mr. Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill—which received only three Republican votes, all in the Senate—is his doing.
He set up markers to determine whether he would support the bill. For example, it had to save or create 3 million new jobs. And it had to provide an immediate boost to the economy.
And while some in the media have noted that most members of Congress didn’t know what was actually in the bill, the more important issue is that no one knows whether the stimulus package will help, or even hurt, the economy.
Read More...
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IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews will appear today on the USA Radio Network’s “Point of View” with hosts Kerby Anderson and Carmen Pate.
Dr. Matthews will be discussing the new health information technology provisions within the stimulus bill, and how this may affect patients and health care providers.
Listen live online from 1 pm to 3 pm CT. To read more about this topic in IPI’s new TechByte, “Up Close and Personal,” click here. Read More...
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Are CEOs Wasting Their Bailout Money? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says some are, but they’re amateurs when compared to Congress...
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri has introduced legislation that would limit CEO pay to $400,000 if that company is getting federal bailout money.
Referring to some of the huge bonuses being paid by bailed-out CEOs, the senator said, “I don’t get it. These people are idiots.”
But CEOs aren’t the only ones wasting taxpayer money. The economic stimulus package is filled with expenditures that do nothing for the economy, like:
$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, and
$2.5 billion for the National Science Foundation.
Maybe Senator McCaskill should instead introduce legislation that limits congressional pay every time Congress wastes taxpayers’ money. Read More...
Bailout Money |
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A study by a coalition of Texas municipalities—the Cities Aggregation Power Project—says the state needs “meaningful reform” of its electric deregulation policies to compensate for what it calls generally higher electricity prices since deregulation began 10 years ago.
The power industry responds that the Texas Electric Choice Act of 1999 is achieving what it was meant to achieve—the replacement of regulation with “fierce competition” that not only enhances investment in new power sources but maintains downward pressure on prices.
Who’s right?
A good way to think about the perpetual problem of energy prices is to recall that price regulation is a game governments play in order to appear protective of voters who also happen to be consumers.
Government just thinks it knows a commodity’s right price. Read More...
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The “stimulus bill” will throw $20 billion dollars at an effort to improve health information technology (IT). The idea is that if patient health data is digitized and formatted in standardized ways so that the data is easily exchanged and is interoperable with different systems, health outcomes should improve and efficiencies can be obtained.
And that’s almost certainly true (although we don’t think for a minute that it ought to be done through a bill claiming to provide short-term economic stimulus).
But when you digitize and standardize data, you don’t simply make it easily accessible, but you also make is EASILY ACCESSIBLE, if you take our meaning.
Health care providers should be able to transfer information efficiently, and that usually means electronically. Read More...
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On this, the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, I thought I'd briefly review Lincoln's view on intellectual property.
Lincoln was a firm believer in intellectual property. He is famously quoted as saying that "the patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
Lincoln also called called the introduction of patent laws one of the three most important developments "in the world’s history," along with the discovery of America and the perfection of printing.
Lincoln was the only American president to himself hold a patent. Abraham Lincoln received Patent #6,469 for "A Device for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals" on May 22, 1849. Read More...
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Today the Obama administration announced that it was suspending a planned opening of coastal oil and gas exploration, which was a policy change instituted last summer by the Bush administration amidst concerns about high energy prices.
Of course, we knew this about Obama. We knew that he has completely bought in to the radical environmentalist agenda, and that his promise to allow offshore drilling was simply a temporary campaign rhetorical shift in order to win the election.
I just thought the back-tracking would take a little longer than this. Read More...
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In 2001 the federal estate tax, more accurately dubbed the “death tax,” assessed a levy of 55 percent on savings left at death over $1 million.
The 2001 Bush tax-cuts phased out this tax, reducing it to zero in 2010. Under the scheduled phase out, the assessment this year declines to 45 percent on savings over $3.5 million for individuals, $7 million for married couples.
Now President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats want to freeze the tax at this year’s levels, and eliminate the complete phase-out scheduled for next year.
But every dollar left behind at death has already been subject to federal taxes at least once, under the income tax, and/or the corporate tax, and/or the capital gains tax, and more. It is unfair, harsh and discriminatory for the government to take another big bite out of those funds at death.
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You Weren’t Planning to Throw That Food Out, Were You? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says the food police are at the door...
Great Britain is cracking down on waste and inefficiency—in the kitchen.
The British government agency known as the Waste and Resources Action Programme says that British households waste an average $800 worth of food each year.
So government employees, called “food champions”—others are calling them “food police”—are going door-to-door to talk about portion size, food expiration dates and point out where the freezer is.
The food champions, whose training lasts all of one day, are part of a larger government effort called “Love Food Hate Waste,” which has already cost British taxpayers $5.5 million.
Read More...
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In his 1981 inaugural speech Ronald Reagan famously said “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
During the debate over how to get the economy going again, we are witnessing a case study in Reagan’s observation.
Consider that government created the problem in the first place through too loose money (Federal Reserve), and purposely distorting the mortgage markets for social engineering purposes (Fannie Mae, Community Reinvestment Act).
Now to fix their mess, our political leaders propose to borrow enormous sums of money that future generations will have to repay. But is it possible that in this crisis, government is again the problem rather than the solution?
Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed featured on Forbes.com, IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara explains why President Obama's $825 billion-plus stimulus plan won’t bring economic recovery to the nation. Instead, Ferrara prescribes a comprehensive plan of income and corporate tax cuts to revive the U.S.
Ferrara writes:
“…For the U.S. economy to remain internationally competitive, the federal corporate rate should be slashed to 20%. The heavily burdensome federal corporate capital gains rate should also be cut from 35% to the current individual rate of 15%, and that individual rate and the dividends tax rate of 15% should be made permanent…
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There's an op/ed in today's Washington Times about intellectual property and the U.S. auto industry. Which doesn't seem terribly interesting, even to someone like me who is interested in intellectual property.
Except that there is a terribly important point in the piece regarding IP and "green tech." Namely, that there is an emerging international argument that "green tech" technologies are too compelling to allow them to be covered by patents in the traditional sense, because, in their philosophy, that locks the knowledge away from the developing countries most in need of this critical "tech transfer."
Read More...
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The Heritage Foundation has thankfully explained why the idea Sen. Mitch McConnell has been floating to have the government offer fixed 4% mortgages is a bad idea.
refinancing mortgages at very low interest rates would be a costly initiative and a massive new government intervention in housing and finance markets that would yield few if any of the promised benefits. Read More...
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Can Democrats Make the Health Care System More Efficient? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says they’ve never done it in Medicare, after 40 years...
Democrats say they want to make health care more affordable by reducing inefficiencies in the health care system.
But Medicare, the 40-year-old federal health insurance program for seniors, is riddled with fraud and inefficiency. And Congress has never fixed those problems.
The government estimates there is $60 billion of fraud in Medicare—every year.
- A recent government report found that Medicare paid as much as $92 million since 2000 for equipment supposedly prescribed by dead doctors.
- And a Justice Department strike force recently prosecuted 120 people for trying to bilk Medicare out of $400 million.
Read More...
Medicare Fraud |
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IPI senior fellow Dr. Lawrence Hunter will appear Thursday morning on Ft. Lauderdale’s WFTL Morning News.
Tune in live at 7:40 am EST as Hunter explains to host Russ Morley how consumers may be impacted by news of State Farm’s departure from the Sunshine State’s homeowners insurance market. Read More...
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IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara will appear this evening on Wisconsin’s “Vicki McKenna Show” to discuss Senate bill 334, “The Healthy Americans Act”—a real healthcare nightmare.
To listen live at 6:09 pm EST, visit WISN online at http://www.newstalk1130.com/main.html. Read More...
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In American Spectator online, IPI’s Peter Ferrara takes on S. 334, “The Healthy Americans Act,” calling it a “health care nightmare,” and “an assault on the standard of living for the American middle class.”
Ferrara writes:
“There are roughly 8 million people in America without health insurance, who are not illegal immigrants, already eligible for coverage under Medicaid or other government health programs, or in families earning over twice the poverty level. This is out of a total U.S. population of over 300 million (less than 3%). But not to worry. The federal government is going to fix that problem by taking over and running the entire U.S. health insurance market. In the process, the government will tell you what health insurance you must buy, and send you the bill, to be paid on your income taxes. Read More...
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Defenders of the economic stimulus package have shifted from being disingenuous to just plain crazy talk.
President Barack Obama, along with others, claims the stimulus package will boost total gross domestic product (GDP) by $1.50 for every $1.00 the government spends. The justification for the claim is what economists call the “multiplier effect.”
Assume Jones invests $10 million in a new factory. He hires contractors to get his new business ready, and he hires new employees. Those individuals will spend that new income on things they need, and they may put some of it in a bank, which can then loan part of it to others.
These transactions tend to expand the original $10 million, although no one is sure by exactly how much. Most economists think it’s in the range of 1.5 or 2.0 times the original amount. Thus, a $10 million initial investment could ultimately add $15 million to $20 million to the economy.
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IPI senior fellow Dr. Lawrence Hunter appeared today on the “Burnie Thompson Show,” heard in Northwest Florida on WYOO-Panama City, to discuss how homeowners will be impacted by the departure of State Farm from the Florida homeowners insurance market.
To listen to the full half-hour interview, click here. Read More...
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I received an email this morning from a gentleman in India who had read my op/ed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the other day.
My Indian correspondent said:
I live in India and have been following the sequence of bailouts in the U.S with bewilderment for various reasons:
1. U.S is supposed to be the capitalist mecca of the world ...
2. Economic policy was to reward risk ..
3. Taking care of companies was not Government's business ..
4. Those who make crass and stupid mistakes are punished ..
5. Regulators who slept at the wheel would be asked to take a walk ....
Does any of the above hold good today?
The only positive I can see is that we need not listen to lectures on capitalism from the U.S ANYMORE .... Those living in glass houses should not throw stones...
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A thousand rooms! A 50,000-square-foot ballroom! A spa! A $525 million price tag! Just the kind of quarters you might want to luxuriate in as a Dallas convention-goer.
That’s the projections for the new city-owned convention hotel. And Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert wants taxpayers to pony up the votes—and the bucks—to put the city in the hotel business.
The mayor and local-convention promoters say 22 other cities already have convention center hotels. And unless Big D follows suit, economic-weather forecasts call for the loss of “$800 million in direct spending and $2.6 billion in annual economic impact.”
But since politicians almost always understate the costs of projects and programs they support and overstate the revenues, we think it’s a break-even deal at best—and most likely a money loser.
Read More...
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IPI senior fellow Dr. Lawrence Hunter will appear on Panama City’s “The Burnie Thompson Show,” to discuss how Florida homeowners will be affected by the departure of the Sunshine State’s largest property insurer.
To listen live, tune in from 7:00 to 7:45 am CST to NW Florida’s WYOO 101.1 FM, or click here to listen live online. Read More...
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In a new op/ed featured today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, IPI senior fellow Dr. Lawrence Hunter writes:
"Two years ago, Gov. Crist dared insurance companies to leave Florida if they couldn't do business under regulations that essentially forced them to lose money. Last week, State Farm Insurance Company, Florida's largest writer of homeowners' insurance, announced it is going to discontinue writing homeowners' policies in the state.
Read More...
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Author: TechBytes || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA