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Even the Washington comPost says "Enough already"
Topic Started: Jul 15 2009, 04:13 PM (231 Views)
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The Deep-Pockets Mirage
House Democrats would have us believe that the rich can pay for it all.




Wednesday, July 15, 2009

THERE IS a serious case to be made that the U.S. income tax system should become more progressive. The average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households shrank from 33 percent in 1986 to about 23 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of adjusted gross income claimed by that highest-earning sliver of American society doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. So, in principle, higher taxes for the well-heeled could make sense -- as part of a broader rationalization of the unduly complex tax code.

But there is no case to be made for the House Democratic majority's proposal to fund health-care legislation through an ad hoc income tax surcharge for top-earning households. The new surtax would hit individual households earning $350,000 and above. It would start at 1 percent, bumping up to 1.5 percent at $500,000 in income and to 5.4 percent at $1 million. The new levy would begin in 2011 and is supposed to raise $540 billion over 10 years, about half the projected cost of health-care reform. The rest of the money would come from reduced spending on Medicare and Medicaid -- though the surtax for the lower two categories would jump by a percentage point each in 2013 unless the Office of Management and Budget determines that the rest of the bill has saved more than $150 billion.

The traditional argument against sharp increases in the marginal tax rates of a very narrow band of Americans is that it could distort their economic behavior -- most likely by encouraging them to put more of their money into tax shelters as opposed to productive investments. This effect could be greatest in certain states, such as New York, where a higher federal rate would add to already substantial state income taxes. The deeper issue, though, is whether it is wise to pay for a far-reaching new federal social program by tapping a revenue source that would surely need to be tapped if and when Congress and the Obama administration get serious about the long-term federal deficit.
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That moment may be approaching faster than they would like. Even if Congress pulls off a budget-neutral expansion of health care, the gap between federal revenue and expenditures will reach 7 percent of gross domestic product in 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And that's assuming that the economy returns to full employment between now and then. The long-term deficit is driven by the aging of the population as well as by growing health-care costs, both contributing to Social Security and Medicare expenses. There is simply no way to close the gap by taxing a handful of high earners. The House actions echo President Obama's unrealistic campaign promise that he can build a larger, more progressive government while raising taxes on only the wealthiest.

Mr. Obama praised the House bill yesterday without addressing the surtax. A far better way to pay for health care would be to end the tax break for employer-provided health benefits, a subsidy that not only artificially pumps up demand for expensive treatments but also disproportionately benefits upper-income earners. Eliminating or, at least, capping it would be good health-care policy as well as good tax and budget policy. Pretending that "the rich" alone can fund government, let alone the kind of activist government that the president and Congress envision, is bad policy any way you look at it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/14/AR2009071403075.html?nav=hcmoduletmv
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jf1acai

Good article!

Although I no longer have, and cannot afford to pay for, health insurance, I am not happy with any of the proposals I have seen so far.

I hope this sort of information will help to create something that is beneficial, and realistic.

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Hello again
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jf1acai
Jul 15 2009, 09:03 PM
Good article!

Although I no longer have, and cannot afford to pay for, health insurance, I am not happy with any of the proposals I have seen so far.

I hope this sort of information will help to create something that is beneficial, and realistic.

You could afford to pay your medical insurance if the government quit taxing you to pay for other people's health care.
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jf1acai

Quote:
 
July 16, 2009
The Lies The Media Ignores

Karl Rove at the WSJ:

So what's a president to do when the promises he made about his economic stimulus program fail to materialize? If you're Barack Obama, you redefine your goals and act as if America won't remember what you said originally. That's a neat trick if you can get away with it, but Mr. Obama won't. His words are a matter of public record and he will be held to them.

I have to disagree with Karl on that last part. The msm will never hold Obama accountable for his words. They will never remind us of them. They will be ignored (except by Fox News). It is a neat trick and Obama will get away with it. The media has too much invested in Obama. They love Obama too much to actually do their job. The media threw away the last vestiges of their integrity during the Presidential campaign. Now they see their job as a way to keep Obama looking good until all the liberal policies they believe in are implemented.

People seem to forget that Newsweek sat on the Monica Lewinsky story during the Clinton administration. The media was not going to harm their precious Bill. It took the Internet to break the story, and then it was simply too big to ignore. If the press was going to suppress that story for Clinton, you can imagine what they would do for Obama.

But, we will do what we can here in the blogosphere to remind people of the truth:

When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration promised, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, "You'll see the effects begin almost immediately." Now it's clear that those promised jobs and growth haven't materialized.

So Mr. Obama is attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post that his stimulus "was, from the start, a two-year program." That is misleading. Mr. Obama never said if his stimulus were passed things might still get significantly worse in the following year.
.............

Earlier this year, Mr. Obama assured us that most of the stimulus money "will go out the door immediately." But it hasn't. Only about 7.7% of the stimulus has been spent in the six months since its passage, and more of it will be spent in the program's last eight years than in its first year. So now the president claims he said something different. "We also knew that it would take some time for the money to get out the door," Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.


Pres. Obama says what needs to be said at the moment. He blatantly lies about what he has said in the past, and the media lets him get away with it. In the above example he even uses the same wording with the lie. "Will go out the door immediately" to "We also knew that it would take some time for the money to get out the door." He doesn't worry about using the same wording, because he knows the msm will never call him on it. I can assure you that if Bush had done the same thing we would have seen the two statement side by side, on video, over and over on every news channel until the American public got it. SNL would have done a skit on it.

Another example of a lie:

As is Mr. Obama's habit, he has answered his critics by creating straw-man arguments. In last weekend's radio address, he attacked detractors as those who "felt that doing nothing was somehow an answer." But many of Mr. Obama's critics didn't feel that way. They offered -- and Mr. Obama almost completely ignored -- constructive ideas to jump-start the economy.

For example, House Republicans offered an alternative recovery package of immediate tax cuts and safety-net measures that cost half as much as Mr. Obama's stimulus program. Republicans have also calculated that their plans would have created 50% more jobs than the stimulus. They reached that estimate by using the same job-growth econometric model that the president's Council of Economic Advisors used for the stimulus.


What Obama knows is that the vast majority of the American public will never hear about the offered alternative recovery package proposed by Republicans. He knows he can get away with saying "felt that doing nothing was somehow the answer" because no one is going to call him on it.

Since the economy has gotten worse than Obama expected or claimed that it would, he has now taken to lowering our expectations. He tells us things will get worse before they get better.

But when he was ramming through the Stimulus bill he said:

"Economists from across the political spectrum tell us that if nothing is done, and we continue on our current path, this recession could linger for years,"

So we passed the stimulus bill, putting our country in so much more debt, and now he tells us that the stimulus bill "was not designed to work in four months -- it was designed to work over two years." Umm.. isn't that "lingering for years?" Isn't that what you said would happen if we DIDN'T pass the stimulus?

In January, the Obama administration predicted that without a the stimulus package, unemployment would reach just over 8%, and would be contained at under 8% with a stimulus package.

That didn't happen of course. In June Pres. Obama told Bloomberg News that umemployment will reach 10% by the end of the year.

Remember when Obama said that the stimulus would "save or create between three and four million jobs."

You have to love the wordplay there. By putting "save" in there you pretty much cover all your bases. Even if there were only four million jobs left in the entire United States, you could say that the stimulus "saved" those last 4 million jobs.

Since the Stimulus bill became law, 2 Million jobs have been lost.

Have we learned our lesson here? Nothing Obama predicts or insists about the outcome of these massive spending bills ever materializes.

Now we are suppose to believe Obama when he tell us that in the healthcare bill we will have more choices and will be able to keep the doctor we choose. We are told that it will lower costs. We are told healthcare will be more affordable and more accessible.

Given the track record of this President, do we really believe that those things will happen in healthcare?

Let's not keep making the same mistake, listening to pretty words that never come true.

Your health care depends on you paying attention.

Posted by Rightwingsparkle at July 16, 2009 11:40 AM


Source

Yep, it is an opinion piece.

Yep, it is a blog.

Yep, it is biased toward the right.

Yep, it was posted in Texas.

Nope, I haven't checked every 'fact' expressed.

Still, provides some food for thought, IMO.
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jf1acai

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You could afford to pay your medical insurance if the government quit taxing you to pay for other people's health care.


I didn't realize they were already doing that, other than Medicare/Medicaid.
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archer
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jf1acai
Jul 16 2009, 11:45 AM
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You could afford to pay your medical insurance if the government quit taxing you to pay for other people's health care.


I didn't realize they were already doing that, other than Medicare/Medicaid.
In many ways RT is right...because we have no "universal" healthcare, because many many people are not covered by health insurance, because these same people use the emergency room as their primary care physician, because those who cannot pay for expensive procedures don't....and the hospitals get the payment from the government.......then yes, we are all paying for their care.....and paying far more out of our pockets than we would if EVERYONE had insurance. But hey, the right seems to prefer taxes they cannot see or identify to those they know exactly what they are going for. Never could figure that out.
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Bigtoe
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Near as I can tell the right doesn't mind private companies getting their money- they just don't want the gubbmint to get their paws on it. They're just fine that hospitals can cut out $155 billions dollars they are currently charging us without blinking an eye.
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