FedUpUSA

“You know what I’d rather have them do — this will make my Republican friends puke — as gas is going to go down here now, we ought to just slap a 50-cent or a dollar tax on a gallon of gas,” Akerson said.

Still want to buy a GM car eh?

Just remember folks, when you buy goods and services you are voting with your wallet for the positions that the company is lobbying for at the government level.

GM WANTS YOU TO PAY BETWEEN $5-6/GALLON FOR GASOLINE.

Go ahead folks – buy that nice GM car… and slit your own throat.

The Market-Ticker

You’re also voting to allow GM into public schools to sell this idea to children:  GM Is Using Public Schools To Sell Cars….To 3rd Graders  Exactly how much fascism are you going to support?

January will bring the biggest attacks on your family budget in your lifetime and they are coming through Obama’s taxes, the largest tax increase in American history. These taxes will crash down on your family and small businesses on New Year’s Day January 1, 2011. You will be forced to pay for the wealth redistribution programs shoved down on throats by Obama and his Marxist Congress.

There are no “maybes” at all in this list, none! EVERYTHING that follows will happen!

· Top personal income tax rates will go up from 35% to 39.6%

·The lowest rate will go up to 15% from 10% and all the steps in between will rise as well: the 25% bracket will rise to 28%, 28% to go to 31%; 33% goes to 35% and 35% to 39.6%.

·There WILL be a marriage penalty. There will be narrower tax brackets that will mean more taxes for married people.

·The STANDARD DEDUCTION for married couples will no longer be double the deduction for a single person.

·THE CHILD TAX CREDIT will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child.

·Dependent care and adoption tax credits are going to be cut.

The DEATH TAX which was ended by the Republicans is back. If you die on January 1, 2011 or after the top rate of taxation will be 55% on estates over a million dollars. If you don’t think that includes you, check the value of your home and other taxable properties. If you have a second home and a retirement annuity, a $1 million estate is NOT out of the question.

The CAPITAL GAINS TAX will rise from 15% to 20%. Sell your house and a few shares of stock and see how hard you get hit. The rate on dividends will rise from 15% to 39.6%! In 2013 that rate will rise another 3.8%!

AGAIN, REMEMBER ALL OF THIS WILL HAPPEN, THERE ARE NO “MAYBES”

Many of the taxes that WILL happen because of the passage of OBAMACARE, WILL hit us on January 1, 2011.

HEALTH CARE SAVINGS PLANS are out, over! Health reimbursements to purchase over the counter medicines are out.

IF YOU HAVE A “SPECIAL NEEDS CHILD” you are in for a big hit.

The Democrats cruelty toward special needs children is manifest in their imposed cap of $2,500 per child on Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs). This dishonestly tiny limit will cost families of Downs’ Syndrome sufferers thousands of dollars a year just to keep the level of treatment their child is already receiving.

The tax penalty for Health Savings Account early withdrawals will increase from 10% to 20%.

FAMILIES WHO NEVER WERE HIT WITH THE ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX (AMT) will be hit on January 1, 2011. TWENTY FOUR MILLION more families will have to pay the AMT. Because Congress refused to index the AMT these families will have to figure their taxes at a higher rate.

Small business expense deductions WILL be slashed. Depreciation of purchased equipment will drop by 90% from $250,000 to $25,000 IMMEDIATELY!

DEDUCTIONS FOR TUITION ARE OVER and TAX CREDITS for education are now limited. This will include employer provided educational programs.

THERE WILL BE NO MORE TAX ADVANTAGES FOR CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS FROM IRAs. Currently retirees can contribute up to $100,000 a year directly to charities and receive a tax benefit. THAT’S OVER NOW!

These taxes were shoved down our throats by the Democrats. Not a single Republican voted for any of them. Remember that on November 2. It won’t stop all of these taxes but the only way to roll them back is to vote REPUBLICAN and get others to vote REPUBLICAN.

For more details on Obama’s tax attacks on your family go to:
http://www.atr.org/sixmonths.html?content=5171

Collins Report

They’re out in force trying to defend the indefensible:

These cost savings are real. They will grow over time. And they will make U.S. businesses more competitive.

….

The bill President Obama signed into law last week helps avoid each of these equally unappealing options.

I understand that in these difficult economic times, the potential for any additional expense is not welcomed by American businesses. But in the long run, the health insurance reform law promises to cut health-care costs for U.S. businesses, not expand them.

In a word:

Let’s take a look at why we have a problem – we’ll look at the largest contributors to the mess, not the “little things.”

We will start with cost shifting.

This is one of the primary causes of health care “inflation” – in short, those who pay cover those who don’t have any money.  The new law attempts to address this by forcing everyone to have insurance in some form or another.  Or does it?  In fact no, it does not.

Assuming that the mandate passes constitutional muster (and I don’t think it will) the problems remain.  Specifically, illegal invaders still get emergency (including “planned emergencies” like childbirth) care at no cost to them – ever – and you get the bill.

But the cost-shifting doesn’t stop there.  The worst part of the cost-shifting is in the medical device and pharmaceutical business.  Other nations slap cost controls on pharmaceuticals, saying to the companies that they will pay “$X” for some device or medication – and if the drug company does not agree to sell for “$X” then the nation threatens to either not buy at all or break their patents and reproduce the drug or device within their borders, giving the company nothing.

The problem of course is that most pharmaceuticals and many devices have a cost structure that is more than a bit skewed.  That is, the first pill may cost $1 billion – in development and testing expenses.  Many drugs are “dry holes”; the company spends but the drug proves ineffective or even dangerous, and thus the money is lost. 

Subsequent pills may cost $2 each to manufacture – once that first billion is spent.

Obviously, the drug companies must amortize that billion dollar development expense over the projected life and sales cycle for the drug.  If they fail to do so they go out of business.

Everyone in the world who has access to that drug gets the benefit of the development.  We in The United States get to pay the entire cost, because it is only here that we do not price-control drugs and threaten manufacturers with patent breaks if they don’t price “as we like it.”

This is responsible for most of the drug and device price inflation we have experienced – we are literally paying for the development of new treatments for more than 6.8 billion people yet there are only 330 million of us in the United States.  That is, we bear twenty times our “fair share” of those development costs.

Medicare Part “D” is projected to be the fastest-growing deficit-generator; this should not surprise, given the gross and outrageously unfair means by which we literally absorb the entirety of worldwide drug development expense.

All of this, by the way, occurs due to government.  Were government to refuse to protect those companies with laws that preempt the ordinary (and reasonable) presumption that a person who owns a thing may dispose of it as they see fit, cross-border trade flows would put tremendous pressure on these price disparities.  Prices would fall here (a lot) and rise everywhere else (a good bit.)  While the price-leveling would not be perfect by any means this much is certain – it is impossible for us to control the parabolic rise in drug expense when we’re bearing the burden of development for nearly 7 billion people on the backs of 330 million Americans.

We also cost-shift when it comes to illegal invaders.  There is no agreement on exactly how many billions these illegals cost-shift to legal American citizens and residents – but that it amounts to tens of billions of dollars annually is not in dispute.  There is no particular reason to allow that to occur – we could just as easily pass a law providing that hospitals and other emergency care providers send their bills for anyone with no insurance or money to the Federal Government, who then pays the bills immediately.  The government then either turns the matter over to the IRS for collection (if a US Citizen or Resident) or bills it back to the foreign nation in the case of an illegal invader.  This instantly stops all the cost-shifting for both the uninsured and the illegal invaders, and costs the government nothing!

There are many other factors in the health care cost explosion (with the disconnect in visibility between cost and your actual visibility of that expense being a big one) but until we get the cost shifting under control all other debates about how we’re going to “control costs” are a waste of time.

I wrote a four-point plan in September of last year that would have actually addressed costs by going after all of the major components that drive medical price ramps.  It was faxed to all 535 fools in DC.  It is particularly telling that not one of those points was addressed in the bill proffered and passed, proving that cost containment was never a goal of this legislation – instead, it was designed and executed to suit the lobbying interests who are simply trying to claw even more of your money into their pockets.

Wake up America – you’re being robbed – again – by both the Demoncrats and Rethuglicans.

If you were wondering where the hidden taxes are in “Health Reform”, guess what – President Obama has just given you something to sit on.

The forced march to pass ObamaCare continues, and all that matters now is raw politics. But opponents should go down swinging, and that means exposing such policy debacles as President Obama’s 11th-hour decision to apply the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to “unearned income.”

That’s what savings and investment income are called in Washington, and this destructive tax wasn’t in either the House or Senate bills, though it may now become law with almost no scrutiny.

This is unbelievably destructive to capital formation.

For the person who is “short-term trading” (e.g. daytrading, etc) this is a relatively small tax, an increase of about 7% in the tax (2.9% applied to the 39.6% maximum rate on “ordinary income”, which short-term capital gains are.)

But for the person who is INVESTING for the long haul, that is, who is holding stocks for more than one year, this takes the marginal rate from 15% to 17.9%, an increase of almost 20% in the tax owed.

This, of course, comes on the back of President Obama’s fraudulently engineered “rally”, which was created through Congressional intervention to permit – surprise surprise – legalized accounting fraud through “mark to model.”

So you got your stock market rally, and now President Obama and The Democrats are going to cram a 20% tax increase down your throat if you profited from it - and at this point, being 2010, there’s not a thing you can do about it.

It gets better.  Since ordinary investors can only write off $3,000 in capital losses, when you lose you don’t get a tax credit.  Oh yeah, you get to carry forward the loss to future years, but you paid the tax on the gains already – this is a putative future credit back.

Oh, and let’s not forget that there was already a huge tax increase coming this year - the long term capital gains rate goes to 20% at the end of this year anyway as the Bush tax cuts expire.

So in fact the rate goes from 15% to 22.9%, a fifty-three percent increase in the tax rate.

And oh, if your AGI goes over $200,000 by even a dollar you are subject to this tax from the first dollar of your investment income.

A fifty-three percent increase in taxes on long-term (that is, capital-forming, long-term investment) capital gains – exactly the sort of investment activity you want to form businesses and invest for the long haul in America’s future, not to mention generating jobs by forming those enterprises.

That’s slammed the door on any interest I might have in forming a new business as I did in the 1990s – ever – and I suspect I’m not alone.

When this goes into effect my capital, other than that which I can shelter from taxation, is no longer going to be put at risk in the markets. I’d rather live in a nice little cottage on the beach and simply expend what I have rather than contributing to capital formation in any way, shape or form under a punitive system like this.

Why?

Because if Congress demonstrates that it will put 53% on the capital gains rate once I’ve already committed my capital (thereby destroying my return) I will not take the risk of them doing it again and making the rate even more punitive.