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June 2009
President Obama has been taking some political licks for backtracking on his campaign opposition to taxing employee health benefits.
Good. He so demagogued a somewhat similar proposal by his opponent, Sen. John McCain, that the president should be taking some heat for—at least potentially—flip-flopping.
That said, capping the employee health insurance tax exclusion is one of those public policy issues that deserves a serious debate—and it’s not getting it.
The money employers spend on employee health coverage is excluded from employee income. Not taxing that employer-provided income “costs” the federal government nearly $150 billion a year, according to the Joint Tax Committee (for 2007). And those with the richest insurance packages get the biggest tax subsidy.
Now, the tax code is often used to encourage certain behavior (whether it should is a question for another day). Read More...
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One could blog every day with instances like this, where Canadians with health emergencies end up having to come to the U.S. for treatment.
A critically ill Hamilton preemie turned away from McMaster Children's Hospital is all alone in a Buffalo intensive care unit because her parents don't have passports to get across the border.
Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.
A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.
Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn't follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. Read More...
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The drive for new, more efficient, renewable “green tech” is real this time.
For some, the importance of green tech is its ability to address concerns over damage to the planet due to the burning of fossil fuels, while for others, it’s all about reducing dependency on “foreign” oil.
But perhaps the consensus driver of green tech is the observation that there is simply greater competition than ever for scarce energy resources such as coal, oil, and natural gas. “Scarce,” of course, doesn’t mean we’re running out of carbon energy—in fact, projections are regularly enlarged and expanded regarding the quantity of carbon energy sources still available for energy production. But with demand projected to continue to grow, it looks like there’s nowhere to go but up for energy prices based on carbon.
Read More...
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Once again, the U.S. Congress is going to vote on a massive piece of legislation without even a couple of days to read and consider the details of the bill.
"The fastest speed-readers and the most intelligent minds can't make informed decisions with that much time. How can Congress?" Sunlight Foundation Engagement Director Jake Brewer said today in a statement. "The problem here is the bill wasn't developed in the open in a committee, so no one -- including those members of Congress not on the Energy Committee -- knows how this latest version was created."
The foundation points out that while the bill, formally called the American Clean Energy and Security Act, was 946 pages long last week, it has ballooned to 1,201 pages in recent days with little explanation for how or why. Read More...
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Google has become so accustomed to making huge piles of money off of free access to other people's property that they've kinda forgotten that other people besides them like to get paid every once in a while.
Mr. Taxali, an illustrator based in Toronto whose work has appeared in publications like Time, Newsweek and Fortune, received a call in April from a member of Google’s marketing department. According to Mr. Taxali, the Google representative explained that the project will let users customize Google Chrome pages with artist-designed “skins” in their borders.
“The first question I asked,” Mr. Taxali said in a recent interview, “is ‘What’s the fee?’”
Mr. Taxali said that when he was told Google would pay nothing, he declined.
Read More...
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There's a bit of a furor today erupting over the discovery that Chris Anderson, the author of the book The Long Tail and the editor of Wired magazine, has been discovered plagiarizing Wikipedia entries in his new book Free.
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. Read More...
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Nobel Prize Alert: Robert Reich has discovered a new economic law:
"Without the government as competition, the private sector has little incentive to improve."
This is truly breathtaking. As it turns out, it's not the private sector that drives innovation, growth and efficiency, it's the government.
In other words, we should credit the U.S. Postal Service for the innovation and efficiencies that have been gained by FedEx and UPS. They don't get the credit--they'd be big, fat, inefficient and wasteful were it not for the competition provided by the U.S. Postal Service.
Give me a break.
I'd like anyone, anywhere, to show me an example of where the government has competed along side of the private sector. Government doesn't compete with the private sector in any ind Read More...
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Are You Ready for a VAT Tax? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says Congress is looking for more money.
The Washington Post reports that support is growing for a Value Added Tax, or VAT tax, to pay for Congress’s massive spending projects, like health care reform.
A VAT tax is similar to a sales tax, only the tax is charged at each level of production. So a car manufacturer would pay a tax on all of the raw materials and parts it buys to make cars. And then pass those multiple layers of taxes on to consumers in the form of higher car prices.
Politicians love a VAT tax because voters can’t tell how much they’re being taxed, or when the tax is increased. They only see much higher prices.
That let’s politicians criticize those “greedy” businesses for charging too much, while it’s the government that’s raking in the extra bucks. Read More...
 VAT Tax |
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It's only the 18th impeachment in the history of the U.S., and a rare occasion when a Member of the House enters the Senate chamber. Read More...
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We’ve been scanning the headlines for even a hint of media outrage and we’re coming up empty.
Where’s the headline complaining: “Democrats propose cutting Medicare, seniors to see decreased access to health care”?
We know the media aren’t unaware that Medicare cuts can hurt seniors, because they have always complained loudly—until this time.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) says he expects to find $1 trillion for health care reform, in part by cutting Medicare by $400 billion. President Obama has indicated that he too wants to cut Medicare.
So why aren’t the media asking whether such deep cuts will hurt seniors? They certainly picked up on the issue back in 1995, when then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed slowing Medicare’s rate of growth. Not “cutting” Medicare, mind you, just slowing its growth rate.
Read More...
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Now apparently Google considers Wikipedia to be a news source.
Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment was obviously a success, because Google has confirmed for us that the idea has been expanded. Says Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker:
“As with many features on Google News, these links were initially launched as an experiment. Now they’ve been rolled out to all English language editions of Google News.”
Do I even need to explain why this is just WRONG? Read More...
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In a move perfectly consistent with his Marxist, anti-property rights philosophy, Venezuela's big pappi Hugo Chavez is going to do away with patent rights on (certain) pharmaceuticals.
Commerce Minister Eduardo Samán announced on Saturday that “patents have become a barrier to production” and stymie access to medicine, placing the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies ahead of the welfare and needs of the Venezuelan people. With President Hugo Chávez calling patents a “trap,” the government will now revise its patent system, annulling certain pharmaceutical patents and allowing domestic manufacturers to produce licensed medicines. This action follows a recent reform in intellectual property laws authorized by President Chavez.
Read More...
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Biased? Our media? Nobody believes that—except Texans who hoped for an explosion of righteous indignation after Democratic House members “chubbed” 229 bills in order to stop consideration of just one bill they didn’t like.
For five days they talked and walked sooooooo slowly through the Local and Consent Calendar that House business stopped dead. Five state agencies were awaiting reauthorization in order to keep going. Too bad.
The Democrats figured nothing mattered more than blocking a bill that required Texas voters to their ID before voting. So on they talked.
Yet no expressions of outrage from the journalistic big guys, no flaming editorials.
Read More...
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For days I've been hearing about how it's important for the U.S. to not take a hardline on the revolution going on in Iran--that, because of the U.S.'s historic and difficult relationship with Iran, that we should not become a foil (to use President Obama's words) for the dictatorship.
It sounds reasonable and prudent--but let's remember that's NOT what Reagan did. We had a historically difficult relationship with the Soviet Union also, in case we've already forgotten. But Reagan didn't kowtow to the Soviet establishment. He spoke directly to the people who sought freedom in Poland, in Berlin, and in Reykjavik, and didn't refrain from siding with the repressed people out of fear of alienating their totalitarian masters.
And history has already demonstrated the results of the Reagan strategy.
I'm just sayin'. Read More...
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I have spent a fascinating several days on Twitter, literally talking to Twitterers in Iran, and in some cases talking directly to young people who were in the protests. I watched as demonstrators warned each other "don't go to the hospitals--the basijis are taking names at the hospitals" and "helicopters are dropping acid on the demonstrators." Amazing.
I had a discussion with one in particular who was pushing back at Twitterers in the U.S. who were excited and supportive of the demonstrations. This particular person was convinced that America (American neocons, to be specific) wanted the regime to stay in place because "America needs an enemy."
But by the end of the weekend I started to feel sorry for Twitter, because now Twitter matters to governments, and that's bad. Read More...
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Notice the gem in the last paragraph of this article from the U.K. Guardian, which otherwise is about the huge bonuses Goldman Sachs is getting ready to pay out to its partners because of a "record year."
Last week, the firm predicted that President Barack Obama's government could issue $3.25tn of debt before September, almost four times last year's sum. Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds, is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds.
That's right kids--the more the U.S. government goes into debt, the better it is for Goldman Sachs.
And who supplies most of our Treasury Secretaries? Who had the most influence over the bailout bills?
This is not a disinterested firm, folks. Don't worry about the Carlyle Group. Worry about Goldman Sachs. Read More...
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UPDATE: I found the archived video of the entire hearing. Link is here. (Real Audio) Opposition testimony starts at 1:22:22; my testimony is at 1:25:34
It was a warm and humid morning in Baton Rouge on Wednesday. If it weren't for an air conditioned shuttle van running the 6 blocks between the Capitol Hilton and the state capitol, Louisiana might have become the first state to defy the Internet Tax Freedom Act and implement a discriminatory tax on Internet access . . .
No, I don't think the narrative style is working for this blog entry. I'll go back to a less-dramatic style.
I had the privilege of testifying this morning before the Commerce Committee of the Louisiana Senate on a bill that would have placed a "fee" on Internet access for Louisiana citizens in order to provide additional funding for the Attorney General' Read More...
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Can We Rely on Data Saying the Earth Is Getting Warmer? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says a new study raises serious questions.
The U.S. government tracks ground temperatures with more than 1,200 small, climate-monitoring stations placed all around the country. Data from those stations are one reason why some scientists think the earth is warming.
But in a new study from the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a meteorologist recruited 650 volunteers who took pictures of hundreds of those stations.
The team discovered that 90 percent of them failed to meet government-placement standards. Many were:
• Sitting by air conditioner exhaust fans; or
• Surrounded by hot asphalt roads or parking lots; or
• Next to buildings or on rooftops.
Read More...
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Well, whatever else can be said about health care reform, it now seems clear it won’t be cheap.
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, says he expects to raise $1 trillion for health care reform (over 10 years) by cutting Medicare and Medicaid spending by $400 billion (ouch!) and raising taxes by $600 billion (double ouch!!)
President Obama is putting a little detail in his proposed Medicare cuts.
- He wants to chop $106 billion from the disproportionate share hospital program. Actually, cutting the “DSH” program is reasonable. It’s federal money that reimburses certain hospitals that treat a “disproportionate” number of uninsured. If nearly everyone has coverage—and that’s a big IF—then reducing DSH payments makes sense.
- The president also wants to cut $110 billion by making “productivity adjustments” to Medicare providers. Read More...
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So you dodge one bullet. What about the next one? The budget bullet that’s going to be squeezed off in the direction of the Texas Legislature in two years, or sooner?
The Legislature wound up its 2009 session in fairly good shape as far as legislative shapes go. No tax increases. No raids on the “rainy day” fund.
Could have been worse—but may be in the future.
The Lone Star Report, an Austin political newsletter, reminds us that this go-round would have been a killer without federal stimulus spending. Seems that $6.8 billion in programs that would have been covered this year by general revenue are in fact being financed with stimulus money. That means a good-sized budgetary shortfall is coming at the next regular session in 2011. Of course, it’s possible that the Obama administration will still be handing out money then, but we can’t depend on it. Read More...
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When a politician argues that something is necessary to protect the children, you can almost always guarantee it’s time to hold onto your freedoms, your wallet or both. And so it goes in Louisiana.
Attorney General Buddy Caldwell is pushing for a first-of-its-kind law, now headed to the Senate, to raise taxes—though the AG calls it a fee—by at least $2.4 million a year on Louisiana taxpayers who simply desire being on the Information Superhighway. His reason? To “finance” a division of his office for investigating more sex crimes against children online.
The irony here is stunning. While the federal government is spending billions of stimulus dollars, including Louisiana citizens’ hard-earned money, to promote Internet usage, the AG is fighting the spirit, if not word, of the Internet Tax Freedom Act, designed to promote Internet usage and facilitate wider-spread adoption of broadband.
Read More...
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How Does Government Handle an Economic Downturn? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says by scaring people into paying higher taxes.
When private sector companies hit economic hard times, they try to make cuts in ways that least affect the customer.
Not so when governments face a downturn. They start with the most visible and unpopular cuts.
Consider California. The state is facing a budget crunch, so Governor Schwarzenegger proposes:
- Cutting $3.6 billion from the public education system;
- Cutting 10 percent of the state firefighting budget; and
- Releasing 40,000 low-risk prison inmates.
California has a huge budget, yet the only place to cut is putting criminals on the streets? Such proposals maximize the shock value so the public will accept higher taxes.
Read More...
Economic Downturn |
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Both Democrats and Republicans are coming together to support increased transparency in how funds are being distributed through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
When TARP was passed under the Bush administration, it gave the Treasury Department, then run by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the power to distribute the funds as Treasury saw fit.
Lots of people, IPI included, were concerned at the time that there was insufficient transparency and accountability in the legislation.
Under our system of checks and balances, it is Congress’ rightful responsibility to control expenditures of taxpayer dollars, and to exercise oversight over how and where funds are spent. Although Congress delegated to the administration of TARP funds to the executive branch, Congress should not give the Treasury Department a free pass.
Read More...
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The Texas Legislature, which quit and went home last week, might have done better. It also might have done a whole lot worse.
The budget got balanced—without new taxes. That’s more than a lot of states can claim. And a whole lot more than Washington can claim!
Trying to assist small business, lawmakers increased the exemption for the gross margins tax, making it $1 million for the next two years, then $600,000 permanently.
The “rainy day” fund didn’t get raided. Expect it to have nearly $9 billion in spendable funds when legislators next gather in 2011.
A proposal for local option taxes to pay for roads and rail died the death it deserved. More than $1 billion in state transportation revenues right now get sidetracked to non-transportation uses. That needs to stop! Cities and counties should meanwhile remember they’re entitled to deploy local sales tax money for local transportation projects. Read More...
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The Internet is a vast collection of mostly privately owned networks that have agreed to exchange traffic for the mutual benefit of their users. The history of the Internet is of these mostly private actors naturally organizing themselves and their networks outside of the scope and control of government, and in some cases despite attempts of governments to prevent them from doing so.
The Internet thus is not and has never been a centrally planned, top-down, government-directed mechanism. Rather, the Internet represents a triumph of freedom and markets.
The fact that our private broadband infrastructure was built largely from private risk capital with almost no demand on the taxpayer is a strength, not a weakness. Government does not need to spend money in markets where there is already private economic vitality.
But some activists hate our mostly capitalist-owned broadband infrastructure because they think they would do a better job of running th Read More...
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, will soon introduce his disability program known as the CLASS Act.
If you were taking some consolation that Congress had spent so much money over the past few months that funding its remaining wish list, like health care reform, was impossible, well then unconsolate yourself. The CLASS Act could siphon out of the economy the estimated $1.2 trillion over 10 years for the Obama health plan, with billions to spare.
The legislation creates a new government-run disability program. All workers would be automatically enrolled. People could opt out—at least that’s what we’re being told now—but sponsors don’t expect many people to do that.
Read More...
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Congress has this neat little trick. Whenever it wants something done but doesn’t have the cash or credit, it passes the bill on to the states.
The states haven’t got the money either? Well, find it, Congress sweetly replies.
It’s called an “unfunded mandate,” and it’s how a variety of “good deeds,” like free treatment at emergency rooms (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) and national standards for public schools (the No Child Left Behind Act), get implemented and paid for.
Understandably riled over such treatment, Texas House members voted 3 to 1 for an unfortunately non-binding resolution (HCR 50) telling the U.S. government, in essence, look, we’ve got constitutionally guaranteed rights around here, too, and, among other things, we’re “serving notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates.”
And such a resolution co Read More...
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Author: TaxBytes || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA