House Health-Care Proposal Adds $600 Billion in Taxes

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqLNecbH0dcg

June 12 (Bloomberg) -- Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

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Political Math

http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/

Nice blog...think I'll subscribe

Think twice about 'green' transport, say scientists

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.243153c6a091a3b942a75077729e8c92.c51&show_article=1

You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint -- the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change.

So you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet.

Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.

Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.

These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple "tailpipe" tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.

Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.

In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

"We are encouraging people to look at not the average ranking of modes, because there is a different basket of configurations that determine the outcome," Chester told AFP in a phone interview.

"There's no overall solution that's the same all the time."

The pair give an example of how the use of oil, gas or coal to generate electricity to power trains can skew the picture.

Boston has a metro system with high energy efficiency. The trouble is, 82 percent of the energy to drive it comes from dirty fossil fuels.

By comparison, San Francisco's local railway is less energy-efficient than Boston's. But it turns out to be rather greener, as only 49 percent of the electricity is derived from fossils.

The paper points out that the "tailpipe" quotient does not include emissions that come from building transport infrastructure -- railways, airport terminals, roads and so on -- nor the emissions that come from maintaining this infrastructure over its operational lifetime.

These often-unacknowledged factors add substantially to the global-warming burden.

In fact, they add 63 percent to the "tailpipe" emissions of a car, 31 percent to those of a plane, and 55 percent to those of a train.

And another big variable that may be overlooked in green thinking is seat occupancy.

A saloon (sedan) car or even an 4x4 that is fully occupied may be responsible for less greenhouse gas per kilometer travelled per person than a suburban train that is a quarter full, the researchers calculate.

"Government policy has historically relied on energy and emission analysis of automobiles, buses, trains and aircraft at their tailpipe, ignoring vehicle production and maintenance, infrastructure provision and fuel production requirements to support these modes," they say.

So getting a complete view of the ultimate environmental cost of the type of transport, over its entire lifespan, should help decision-makers to make smarter investments.

For travelling distances up to, say, 1,000 kilometres (600 miles), "we can ask questions as to whether it's better to invest in a long-distance railway, improving the air corridor or boosting car occupancy," said Chester.

The paper appears in Environmental Research Letters, a publication of Britain's Institute of Physics.

The calculations are based on US technology and lifestyles.

It used 2005 models of the Toyota Camry saloon, Chevrolet Trailblazer SUV and Ford F-150 to calibrate automobile performance; the light transit systems in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston as the models for the metro and commuter lines; and the Embraer 145, Boeing 737 and Boeing 747 as the benchmarks for short-, medium- and long-haul aircraft.

Obama Tells American Businesses to Drop Dead: Kevin Hassett

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aaaBdVMkjPnU

June 8 (Bloomberg) -- I’ve finally figured out the Obama economic strategy. President Barack Obama and his team have been having so much fun wielding dictatorial power while rescuing “failed” firms, that they have developed a scheme to gain the same power over every business. The plan is to enact policies that are so anticompetitive that every firm needs a bailout.

Once that happens, their new pay czar Kenneth Feinberg can set the wage for everybody and Rahm Emanuel can stack the boards of all of our companies with his political cronies.

...

But last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer came to Washington to announce what Microsoft would do if Obama’s multinational tax policy is enacted.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S.” If Microsoft, perhaps our most competitive company, has to abandon the U.S. in order to continue to thrive, who exactly is going to stay?

At issue is Obama’s policy to end the deferral of multinational taxation.

The U.S. now has about the highest combined corporate tax rate, second only to Japan among industrialized countries. That rate is so high that U.S. firms have an enormous disadvantage versus competitors. The average corporate tax rate for the major developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2008 was about 27 percent, more than 10 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate.

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A Possible Bennett Opponenet?

http://www.viewsandvalues.org/

I don't know much about her yet. She has a good webinar on the 5k leap though.

‘We the People’ vs. ‘I Won’

http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/06/04/senator-jim-demint-we-the-people-vs-i-won/

It is too early to draw conclusions about President Obama and his administration. But so far, nothing so encapsulates the president’s approach to executive leadership than his famous rebuke to stimulus critics: “I won.”

After four months of proposals, decisions, and public statements, it seems the president believes that the 2008 election — or more to the point, his election — represents a fundamental break from the previous 232 years of our history. It’s as if he believes his victory in November was less like the election of previous presidents and more like 1789, when we ratified a new constitution.

In 2001, when Obama called the U.S. Constitution “a charter of negative liberties,” he didn’t mean it as a compliment. “It says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you. But it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”

Obama was wrong on that last point. Article IV of the Constitution lays out in very specific terms exactly what the federal government and state government “must do on your behalf”: for instance, the federal government must protect the states from foreign invasion or violent insurrection.

What President Obama meant is not that the Constitution fails to mandate government action, but that it fails to mandate enough, to satisfy his gargantuan ambitions. And so he daily goes about his business of rewriting America’s social contract, not by amending the Constitution, but by ignoring it all together.

Aside from his constitutional powers, Obama is now also the operational CEO of General Motors, Chrysler, the American International Group (AIG), Citi Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and he wields un-challengeable influence over more than 500 financial institutions that have received federal bailout funds.

But presidents don’t have powers aside from the Constitution.

What this president is doing with the automotive, insurance, banking, and mortgage lending industries is extra-constitutional and dangerous — dangerous specifically because it is extra-constitutional.

Right now, liberals may cheer at the corporate takeovers President Obama has engineered, but only because they agree with his politics. They like the idea of the government forcing Detroit to make green cars, regardless of their profitability. They like the proposed takeovers of the student loan and health care industries. They like the idea of the treasury secretary divvying out $700 billion to whomever he pleases without congressional appropriation. They like these things now because they like and trust the current president and his appointees.

But what happens when Obama leaves office? Do liberals really want a conservative Republican in charge of Wall Street and Detroit, to be the nation’s loan officer for college tuition or home mortgages? What is to stop a future administration from taking over troubled newspapers, movie studios, or television networks, and operating them according to its partisan ends?

The Constitution, that’s what. Or at least, that’s what should. But all that protects the Constitution is the oath we swear to it. After decades of manipulation and mischief, we are getting a preview of what a post-constitutional government would look like: the Supreme Court makes policy, the White House takes over industries, the Treasury Department and IMF appropriate taxpayers dollars, and elected representatives divest their powers to unelected judges and bureaucrats. The dangers of our experiment in extra-constitutional politics are nearing a critical mass.

Which is why President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is not just about the nominee. It is about Obama and his expansive notion of his own power. The qualities he commended in Sotomayor — empathy, life experience, the common touch, and compassion — are admirable, and her personal story is inspiring.

But they have nothing to do with constitutional law. They have nothing to do with the Constitution’s enumerated or reserved powers, or the oath federal judges swear to “administer justice without respect to persons.”

This looming nomination fight will not be between Judge Sotomayor and the Senate, but between the limited powers in the Constitution and limitless ambitions of the Obama Administration. The two cannot be reconciled. Either the language of the Constitution means what the American people thought it meant when it was ratified, or it means whatever this president — or the next – would like it to mean.

It is the difference between the Rule of Law and the Rule of Men, between the primacy of the Constitution and the primacy of empathy. It is, in short, the difference between being governed and being ruled, between “We the people” and “I won.”

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) is a member of the Senate Banking Committee and chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, a caucus of conservative senators.

American capitalism gone with a whimper

This is from a Russian newspaper:
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.

Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Stanislav Mishin