Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is still trying to scrape up money to fund the city budget, and he’s still wrong. Pittsburgh should concentrate on its existing activities that generate money rather than on inventing new, illegal taxes.
http://www.examiner.com/x-14931-Pittsburgh-Public-Policy-Examiner~y2009m11d11-Ravenstahl-still-doesnt-get-it
If we do not get a public option, we will pay billions of dollars in subsidies to private insurers only. 80% of people with no health insurance work, and rightfully, they will get subsidies.
Wrongfully, all that subsidy money paid with your taxes will go to private insurers, and pay for not only health care, but also for:
- Salaries of $20-$25 million for private insurance CEOs
- Perks like private jets, bonuses, and stock shares often worth over $100 million for those CEOs
No government employee gets millions of dollars a year, and perks and stock shares worth over $100 million.
. Your firefighter, police, highway patrol do not make $25 million a year.
. Your congressmen don’t make $25 million a year.
. Your President of the United States does not make $25 million/year.
. Your Medicare, VA and Medicaid bureaucrats do not make $25 million/year.
Ah yes, the "death panel" movement goes on. I heard a rumor that the band "Death Cab for Cutie" was considering a name change to "Death Panel for Grandma." Sounds scary, doesn't it?
Yet, out of all of us, grandma is the least at risk because she has Medicare. The average working American under the age of 65, however, is at risk. The problem I have with this "death panel" debate is that the your health and wellbeing are already controlled by your employer and the insurance companies. COBRA coverage runs almost 4 times more than normal health insurance, if you lose your job... there goes your life. Sound like a "death panel" yet?
Worst of all, the constant drumbeat of "NO TAXES FOR HEALTHCARE" is another problem. How insurance is different from a flat tax, I have no idea. We pay about 25% of our salary, which we would much rather take home, to health insurance. The rich and poor pay the same amount, unless one of the two wants more or less "care." Here's another problem, paying more doesn't necessarily mean "more care," it just means that you pay less for more care than someone who pays a lower premium. If you were healthy and used less care, you really are just throwing your money away to the insurance company. How different is this from paying your money to the government as a tax?
Most people are aware that the tax system is complicated. The more complicated something is, the more room for mistakes there are. For this reason, I think it ought to be simplified, and believe that it can be done to a great degree.
My ideal tax system would have the following properties:
Since implementing stringent "green" guide lines in our home of 5, we have reduced our garbage from 3-4 bags to not even a tall kitchen sized bag a week. Every purchased item's packaging is revied of what part is recicable, items that we can compost we do and some items can be used again (Every bread bag makes a great lunch bag!) To the dismay of our recicling pick up crew we are now sporting 6 recicling cans in our driveway!!! Oh by the way,my three teenagers will take this lesson along with them as their move on in life and may be they will lead a less waistful life.
However too many times I see packaging materials that can not be recicled.
Why not introduce a tax to be paid by those companies that do NOT provide a recicable packaging material. In addition we should introduce a tax for those companies NOT using recicled materials for their packaging.
These actions would eventually force companies to use more recicled goods, increasing the production of these materials. Yes it would drive up the price of your favored cheap brand cookie because it's manufacturer now has to pay extra to use the cheaper packaging material. That's Ok though, its a small price to pay for becoming greener. Aditional revenues gained by the tax should be used to reward the greener companies and for investment of greener energy.
I was talking to a friend who is pretty well off. He is the General Manager of an international hotel chain and a non supporter of President Obama. He is totally against taxing the rich and stated the reason. You know the rhetoric. 40% of people don't pay taxes, etc..., why should the rich suffer because of people like that. The conversation went on and he said that because of the new tax reforms people are moving to tax free or lower tax states and operating their businesses electronically. He said it with such satisfaction that I was appalled and all I could say is: 'That's not right'. Although I thought my words were lost on him, I just couldn't say anything else.
My stance is this. We don't live in a vacuum, or maybe some do. The money made by most businesses is the result of someone else is working. If it were not for the workers things would not progress. I understand workers are paid wages, but who gets rich? Not the workers. There are many reasons why, but most of all it because of high taxes unfairly distributed among people of varying economic stations.
I do not profess to be an economic genius, but I can add and substract. If anyone wants to educate me. Feel free.
We’re still waiting for our middle class cut Mr. President. Huh??? We’ve already gotten our tax cut but most people don’t know that because the White House hasn’t hammered the message home. President Obama has delivered a tax cut for 95% of working Americans but Republicans are still drowning us in noisy claims that the president is raising taxes.
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/
President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama’s budget deficits in context of President Bush’s.
UPDATE: Many defenders are claiming that the numbers above do not include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years. They most certainly do. While Bush did fund the wars through emergency supplementals (not the regular budget process), that spending did not simply vanish. It is included in the numbers above. Also, some Obama defenders are claiming the graphic above represents biased Heritage Foundation numbers. While we stand behind the numbers we put out 100%, the numbers, and the graphic itself, above are from the Washington Post.
We originally left out the link to WaPo. It has been now been added.
CLARIFICATION: Of course, this Washington Post graphic does not perfectly delineate budget surpluses and deficits by administration. President Bush took office in January 2001, and therefore played a lead role in crafting the FY 2002-2008 budgets. Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for the FY 2009 budget deficit that overlaps their administrations, before President Obama assumes full budgetary responsibility beginning in FY 2010.
Overall, President Obama’s budget would add twice as much debt as President Bush over the same number of years.
Congressional Quarterly also makes the point that "debt subject to the statutory limit will grow to $17.0 trillion by fiscal 2014." As of yesterday, the national debt stood at $11.2 trillion.
Well wouldn't you know it, here we go again.
Let's put some things in perspective. One of the reasons the Prez got elected in November was because American citizens were rightfully angry at the status quo. We have been taxed progressively more ever since World War I, we have continually fought wars of some kind abroad ever since that time, we have continued to decrease civil liberties, and we have since been getting robbed by a monopolistic health care industry, fleeced by insurance---a requirement to survive---and we have stood by like idiots while the Constitution gets torn to shreds in the name of unjust wars. We have more enemies abroad than ever before because of our unjustified aggressive actions. No WMDs in Iraq, and no quick exit from Afghanistan, not with all those oil possibilities by the Caspian Sea.
I write today because I have been receiving mailings from Moveon.org frequently as of late, the latest "we need your help" being about Prez Obama's "drastic" 30% health care discount. To me, this is an insult, a trick and a ploy to get the claws of the insurance business into everyone, like good mafiosi. Furthermore, it is insuting because SINCE WHEN does MONEY make the issues change? Yes, I am realistic, I know how it works, but enough is enough already. Nobody asks for research, or a court date, or a hearing, or protests. I get letters 3 times a week from the "representatives" of the sitting administration and Barrack Obama asking me for donations and phone calls to my representatives. You've got a goddamned phone, pick it up, and call them up, or email them, yourselves, it would seem you all know each other a lot better. Stop jerking the working man, the 80% of citizens in this country around. Stop running away from the term "socialized medicine." Look at places that have it, check the lifespan of the inhabitants, and you will see, we pay top dollar for at best mediocre medical care, or as I call it, the Parrot Squad of the Averages.
Nevertheless, before I lose this fire, and so muse (because I too have been hypnotized in the past, asleep to what is really going on), let me say that we don't need conspiracy theories when the facts, common sense, and plain observation prove the perspective we should finally now, undoubtedly, begin to see. For force of effect, let's put this perspective this way, as what Bob says: Bob says the government is our enemy. This government is no longer OUR government, as the founding documents of this country say it ought be; it is not us, it is the "other."
We elect representatives and so we are a republic, but scarcely half of us bother to vote. Of the half that do not enter the polls, a good percentage would vote, but do not for varying reasons, not all bad ones, for instance, they say "there is no real choice." Blue team, or red team only get to play, and they are in fact identical; there is no difference between a liberal republican and a conservative democrat. The green, orange, or yellow teams, who want to play, have to face tremendous handicaps to get the attention and media exposure required to relay messages these days. They both, blue and red, speak the same, they both speak the words the surveys say some people want to hear, they do not lead so much as carry on with the bullshit line we've had since Wilson. Hyperbole, possibly, the point is many do not vote because they feel it is FUTILE. "This machine is a-rollin', baby, and no amount of sanity, rationaility, or reason will stop it." So, they look out for their own, pay no attention, if, it seems, they are smart.
Some of these people got up and participated last election because they had hope. Hope for real change. Hope for the poor. Hope for universal health care. Hope for human rights, for the end of silly wars of American lives sacrificed for business deals, even hope we would stop arresting people for growing pot, or smoking pot. All these folks mobilized because they saw a possible breakthrough. But no, you see, the government runs itself as a business, a racketeering loanshark arm of coersion, as of the Sicilian school after Lansky, applied to not just a city, but the entire nation. Covered with the tired robe of rhetorical "change" we quiet down a bit and take the (Merck and Pfizer, e.g.) soma...we stay sedated.
These are some of the Big Businesses that are the strongarms of, let us say, the syndicate, or, or Joint, the different "families" involved in making the American people pay up or pay the price, not for any valid reason, but for the syndicate's own easy existence and material benefit. The choices they pretend to offer the American people, as in candiate Blue, or candidate Red, Bob says, are both already approved by the mafiosi government. His examples:
1. The Congress, the Judicial System, the Executive Branch
--All of these people are making a good living on you. This is not a congress of fellow blacksmiths and bartenders. This is a bunch of lawyers and sons and daughters of rich daddies, most of whom have done little real work their entire lives. All of them suck up taxpayer money, which money also goes to those lunches, airplanes, vacations, the best wine and liquor and champagne, and an endless supply of paper, pencils, and hot secretaries, I will not speculate about hot tubs and Vegas trips. Let's not forget about that great Health Insurance Plan, remember, the one the Prez said we would be able to buy into.
2. Arms Dealers
--The real Big Business, also the related guerillas, guns-for-hire, and departments of association concerned with buying, selling, making, maintaining, designing, and distributing weapons of mas destruction. And small guns and knives and buckles and uniforms and war paint. My friend Bob says the military is our friend, forced to fight wars to expend weapons and secure strategic or lucrative (as in oil) real estate.
3. Big Banking
--Let's recap: we have been hearing for years from the Fed, from the past administrations, that we are broke, that we have no money for children's schools, or to fix roads, or achieve even an efficient bank balance. Yet, when the banks came a-callin', we not only found them the money, HUGE money (WHERE FROM??? TELL THE PEOPLE!), but we gave it to them toot sweet. Do they think we are all imbeciles?
4. Insurance
--Wouldn't you love to have a business selling a product the government says you must have? For a home loan, for a driver's license, to own a vehicle...and now, maybe, for health care too? What is a 30% discount? It is an insult, because the increased business will actually benefit the insurance coffers in the end, with the increased business and perhaps total control in health care. WHY is it so hard just to offer a health care like Canada does, or like Germany does, or like most industialized nations, even Iran. Why, because insurance and banks have a long relationship. Reseach any of this yourself, thoroughly, and you will see. Insurance is one of the powers that be, and the way it looks, soon opting out will not be an option. This smokescreen about how difficult it will be to get ithe 30% frequent flyer discount is to make their aggressive move look charitable. It will pass, and the costs will rise, and the uninsured will still continue to pay cash rather than feed the insurance machine. Which brings us to another related "field":
5. Health care Industry
--All facets, nothing is exempt. Phramaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, every single one of them is overpriced for what they do, and they know it. It's not as if they are compensated for success. Aspirin advertises 5% better results than placebo, and this is THEIR sponsored study. People die by the thousands yearly by taking only aspirin, and yet new, clearly untested pharmaceuticals hit the shelves at an amazing speed, pushing and selling pills and services with 1000% markup, with arguable success for the measures. They claim that they offer the best service, when clearly a look at your almanac, or here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-613.pdf
...will show that this is clearly not the case. Having been to some of those places, I have seen it with my own eyes. We must wait if we are not in emergency. Is that a problem? Only for Ph.D. pseudo-doctors who have the gall to suggest aesthetic treatment is in line with the oath of Hippocrates, or that the insurance will pay for it. 100.00 pills, 3,000 a night beds, 200.00 shots, it's ok, insurance will pay. If the doctors and beds had to take chickens, like in the old days, maybe we wouldn't value so highly someone who was lucky enough to get a good education. As is, they should be paid like bricklayers, who are much more tired after work.
There are more, many more, but I am getting tired. I am dismayed that a President who promised health care for everyone is seemingly resoritng to the bribe of a 30% discount on medical insurance. "Green jobs," to build what, again? Why not build public hospitals, schools, clinics, and let the working men really work and earn a living, in the mean time creating real infrastructure and jobs and facilities for millions in education and health care?
Aw don't worry , I am sure we can find the money.
Nabahe acaeka
The president and the first lady reported an adjusted gross income of of more than $2.6 million last year, and paid $855,323 in federal income tax. The Obamas also donated $172,050, to 37 different charities, including $25,000 contributions to CARE and the United Negro College Fund.
The Obamas, who donated $26,270 to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 2007, did not contribute any money to the church in 2008. They donated $240,370 to 33 charities in 2007, including $35,000 to CARE, and $50,000 to the United Negro College Fund.
Why does it seem that the President is watering down his budget proposal to chase votes he won’t get? Republicans proved during the stimulus bill that despite all the concessions made to them then, they would never vote in favor of anything the President wants.
With Democrats, Independents and Moderate Republicans like me on his side, the President should focus on keeping his campaign promises because John Boaner, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are opposed to fresh air, sunshine and Jesus, so long as they think President Obama is in favor of them.
Mr. President, you have helped them marginalize themselves to the maximum extent imaginable. Now it’s time to stand true to your word. Frankly, not everything you promised was what I wanted, but if you do what you told us you’d do, I will continue to support you, and I will vote against those who oppose you, regardless what party they’re in.
How do you deter an enemy who is willing to kill himself in order to kill you? You strike at something more important to him than his own life. Defining that will be easy for me. The next question is can America be as ruthless as our enemies?
The time has come to end the fruitless and unsustainable effort to search and destroy every cave in Afghanistan and bomb every campground in bordering Pakistan. It’s counterproductive anyway.
What will put the fear of America into terrorist masterminds and those who would follow their orders is simple and radical revenge. Masterminds have families: Cousins, brothers and fathers. Eliminate them. All at once, or one at a time, it works just as well. The ones who survive an initial “hunt” will go into hiding. Having some adult male relatives killed and the rest hiding out in caves will demoralize masterminds and their loved ones. You cannot work and support your women like that. You can’t make more baby masterminds that way. You cannot continue the blood line. The women and children will pressure them to stop their plotting and bombing.
People want to leave a familial legacy, and they can’t do that under those circumstances over the long term.
Should America do that? Yes. Do we have the “intestinal fortitude” and sustainable motivation? I don’t think so. But we should, and it shouldn’t take another terrorist attack to get us there.
For the last seven years the CIA has been kidnapping people from other nations and torturing them. Why not just go in there and quietly shoot them to death?
Frankly, by not killing women or children the way those terrorists routinely do, we can even claim the moral high ground.
Sin taxes are not new to the United States of America. To sum these sorts of taxes up quickly, they are, in a nutshell, designed to punish people, monetarily, for activities and products that "the Establishment" feels are no good for public consumption.
What this new Sin Tax on tobacco has done is effectively double the price of cigarettes, and in every respect this is a losing proposition, and one entirely against freedom and the American Way. We might have to come to grips with the fact that this is no longer the usual American Way we grew up hearing about, with its emphasis on liberty and accompanying responsibility. No this is not our Daddy's America. This is damn near a communist state, by which I mean one where the government ever-exceedingly tells its people what to do.
Despite the crying and whining and childish "nasty habit" rhetoric of non-smokers, they do not want to tell you obvious facts about the lung cancer they are so concerned about. Namely, that well over half of people diagnosed with lung cancer never smoked at all. Try to find the actual circumstances of the studies in question, and you will get no more than a summary. They will not tell the details about the actual studies, nevertheless people, even our leaders, accept these "results" as gospel, that the ills of our country will be healed with the more or less prohibition of tobacco. They do not tell you, either, that we have yet---despite trillions invested over the years---to find the cause of one single cancer; how do you suppose we could be so lucky as to have stumbled across lung cancer's cause? Simple, if you smoke and have lung cancer, they mistakenly, and quite unscientifically, therefore cite that smoking as cause.
Well then let's consider our overall health and well-being and ask what else it is that we might not like and should tax, for reason that it is "not good for you." We could start with a primary educational system that is nothing more than learning how to follow orders. While we worry about cigarettes our young people are the most ignorant in the world, shoeless school-goers in Nigeria becoming more educated than our well-protected youth. We could cite hundreds of food products, preservatives, genetically engineered foods, and exhaust fumes which, undoubtedly, have a hand in that cancer rate among non-smokers, as we, the idiots, accept as truth their silly claims that "second hand smoke" from cigarettes is responsible. We could point to aluminum cans our "basic American foods" come in, caffeine in coffee, breakfast foods and snacks and fast foods empty of nutrients and loaded with carcinogenic material. We could point to fat people, who, well, they always disturb my sense of aesthetics, and so maybe they should be taxed for offending me, as does people's lack of washing themseleves properly, undoubtedly because that time in school that should have been spent on biology and hygiene was spent relaying to children the ills about smoking or sex. We could cite perfumes that make me sneeze and gag, obnoxious amounts of gold and diamonds, that nevertheless are legal and untaxed to any greater degree. We could point to atomic and hydrogen bomb blasts, ans pollutants from factories, all of which we inhale, every day.
But I am not here trying to get people to accept smoking. I realize this is a lost cause because of the venomous hatred so many have been instructed to generate towards a simple cigarette, and the godlike status of "science" to the simple-minded yet "educated" among us. What I wish to do is address these sorts of sin taxes on grounds of liberty. You cannot tax these cigarettes when diamonds and gold, hormone-injected meats and vegetables, obscene luxuries, junk foods and the like see no increase. Automobiles that are gas guzzlers, costing 100,000 dollars and more, are allowed to continue, and with no extra taxes added to the purchase prices.
The American spirit is fast dying. A proud people once leery of threats to any and all threats to their freedom, in fact who came here to preserve these liberties for themselves, now find themselves under the tyranny of the majority, without the corresponding respect for their minority. We have become docile sheep, willing to withstand anything the majority of brainwashed by shabby science people shove in our faces. Like sheep, we make not a peep, while the taxes we already pay are squandered by a wasteful and overall stupid government. To throw stuff into the sea would seem to be a citizen's recourse...until he estimates that as requiring just too much effort, especially when a cold six-pack awaits him in the refrigerator, a TV dinner in the freezer, and Family Guy on TV.
Finally, this tax is an insult to our intelligence. This government, which as the years go by exhibits more and more incompetency, somehow came up with almost a billion dollars to bail out the banking and auto industries, how, and where the money came from, we are not explained, but wouldn't you know it, we need to tax cigarettes, already taxed more than their cost to produce, in order to get kids health care.
This is an atrocity, and inane for yet more reasons. What happens if people quit smoking, as obviously the insurance industry, which started this whole mess, wants us to do? Who will pay for childrens' health care then? What will we tax? Isn't it funny how in less than 100 years, in fact about 60, we have gone from a country which barely taxed its citizens at all, to a country which taxes us left and right, and requires permits and licenses for just about everything. We are free? Free to pay taxes, and do what we are told. This is the worst form of tyranny, and the reason we parted with our last similar oppressor, England.
This tax is furthermore unconstitutional, as nobody in Congress represents the smoker; as it seems to me, this is called "Taxation Without Repesentation," and shows again our willingness to accept mediocre science and logic as national guiding principles, and a hot rod of burning tax up our behinds. Fast we are becoming a nation of a great divide, namely between those people who want to think for themselves, make their own choices, run their household their way, and raise their kids as they see fit, and those who want the government to support them, raise their children, tell them what to do, and tell them what is good or bad for them. These latter would get along anywhere, even in Afghanistan, or Rwanda, and not make a peep about the conditions, because they are by nature, sheep. Luckily, for America right now, the so-called "educational system" has been producing these mindless sheep at an ever-increasing rate, guaranteeing the need for nannies. Otherwise these stupid policies and infringements on personal liberties would not be allowed to happen.
Already the discontent is rising, I can feel it, I hear it from my friends, this discontent of the other half that knows and respects freedom and liberty, and what these things mean. The talk of stopping payment of all taxes to this government is growing by the day. Not only that, what will they come for next? You know the old story. They came for blacks, I wasn't black, so I didn't do anything; they came for the Jews but I wasn't Jewish so I didn't do anything. They came for the smokers, but I didn't smoke, so i did nothing. Soon, they will come for you, or what you enjoy, and you know what? There will be no concern left to help you.
Wake up America ...or whatever the hell this country has become, because it certainly is not what our founding fathers intended, read the old documents and feel it rather than parrot the interpretations, of which there is no shortage, by people with axes to grind. We talk about the old days as if we have somehow improved. On the contrary, our founding fathers knew what liberty means, and today would not recognize this Oligarchic Nanny State we call America...as we, with all our goody-goody rhetoric and fancy Blackberries can't add 2 numbers together, and slowly degenerate to a third world country. Obama says we don't need those outsourced jobs here in America, apparently secure that other nations will require the needs of a service economy---while we starve, or leave the handling of our foods and clothing and gadgets in the hands of Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, and China. Stupid, stupid policy.
Were we to truly tax sin, I dare say, 99% of the people running our government, the banks, the big businessmen...would be, right now, flat broke, despite their non-smoking facilities and green tea.
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Congress can do something about those AIG and Merrill Lynch bonuses, while at the same time raising some of the funds we badly need for President Obama's public works, education and health programs. It's quite simple and long overdue: introduce a new 100% tax bracket on all annual income exceeding $1,000,000.
We have a minimum wage; we need a maximum permitted income. Let's tax the greedy class. Surely no one should need more than $1,000,000 a year in income to lead a good life. If they do, they are the ones who should now be forced to sacrifice to help those less fortunate than themselves.
