Archive for August, 2010

The 1099 repeal fiasco, and the Snooki tax.

This wasn’t a good week for ObamaCare, with Missouri voting to repeal the law and a Virginia judge refusing to dismiss a serious Constitutional legal challenge. Unlikely as it sounds, however, the repeal movement even came to include House Democrats.

To wit, the House voted last week to repeal one ObamaCare mandate. It might have been the first part of the bill to go over the side, except Democrats rigged the vote so that it failed, even though it got a majority.

The target was an ObamaCare footnote that could wreak havoc with more than 30 million small businesses. In the name of smoking out the illusory “tax gap” of unreported business income, Democrats snuck in a requirement that companies track and submit to the IRS all business-to-business transactions exceeding $600 annually. This 1099 reporting detail received no scrutiny until the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson exposed the paperwork burden, which would produce no improvement in tax compliance.  Read the rest of this entry »

Three years of spending and monetary stimulus haven’t helped jobs.

Another month, another mediocre jobs report from the Department of Labor. This is consistent with the rest of the economic evidence that this is a lackluster recovery that so far is not turning into a durable expansion.

The economy shed 131,000 jobs in July and the number of jobs created in May and June were revised downward to 221,000 lost jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.5% but that does not reflect the fact that the number of discouraged workers is also up 389,000 from a year ago.

Private employment did inch up in July by 71,000 positions, with a nice 36,000 pick-up in manufacturing jobs, but even that number is deceptive. The vast majority of those jobs were in the auto industry. Alas, not every struggling manufacturing plant in America can have a lifeline to the federal Treasury.  Read the rest of this entry »