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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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What’s the Best Way to Clean a House? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says by letting the sunshine in.
Great Britain is reeling since London’s Daily Telegraph started digging into members’ of Parliament reimbursed expenses. While most of them were legal, many were also outrageous.
- About $3,400 was spent to drain a castle moat.
- Members expensed horse manure, changing light bulbs, tennis court repairs and massage chairs.
- And, one member even expensed an $8 charitable donation.
The scandal has led to several resignations. And the Speaker of the House of Commons has been forced out—the first to do that in 300 years.
In a preemptive strike, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has ordered all House members’ expenses be posted online for public viewing. That’s a good start.
Read More...
 Clean House |
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Author: TaxBytes || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA