Commentary
The Biggest Tax Increase In U.S. History?
Merrill Matthews, 07.26.10, 5:34 PM ET

 The Obama administration just flip-flopped on a long-standing Barack Obama promise. What’s new about that, you ask? In this case it amounts to what’s likely the largest tax increase in U.S. history.

President Obama has repeatedly asserted that the new health care law’s individual mandate requiring everyone to have qualified health insurance coverage or pay a penalty is not a tax. In a testy exchange with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos–who, ironically, also pushed for sweeping health care reform legislation when he worked for then-President Bill Clinton–Stephanopoulos pointed out that ObamaCare critics call the mandate a tax. Obama rejected the claim and noted that his critics call everything a tax: “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”  Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• JULY 26, 2010

The White House budget office offers a scorecard on Obamanomics.

Democrats have been running Congress for nearly four years, and President Obama has been at the White House for 18 months, so it’s not too soon to ask: How’s that working out? One devastating scorecard came out Friday from the White House, in the form of its own semi-annual budget review.

The message: Tax revenues are smaller, spending is greater, and the deficits are thus larger than the White House has been saying. No wonder it dumped the news on the eve of a sweltering mid-July weekend.

Mr. Obama inherited a recession, so let’s give him a pass on the budget numbers for 2009. Clearly the deficit would have been large no matter who was President, even if the David Obey-Nancy Pelosi $862 billion stimulus made it larger than it otherwise would have been. What’s striking about the latest budget estimates, however, is that the White House is predicting the numbers won’t improve much through 2011, the third year of the President’s term.  Read the rest of this entry »

Independent verification about corruption in Adams County government

A plurality of voters believe the country would have been better off if John McCain had beaten Mr. Obama in 2008.

Democrats will be gulping this morning at the Quinnipiac Poll’s latest results. For the first time in the survey’s history, Americans believe by a 48% to 40% margin that President Obama doesn’t deserve re-election. Almost as stinging, a plurality believe the country would have been better off if John McCain had beaten Mr. Obama in 2008.  Read the rest of this entry »

Youth Has Outlived Its Usefulness

American politics is desperately in need of adult supervision.

We start with the president’s dreadful numbers. People in politics in America are too impressed by polls, of course, and talk about them too much. In this we’re like a neurotic patient who constantly, compulsively takes his own temperature. We are political hypochondriacs. But polls offer the only hard quick data there is, and when the temperature-taking consistently shows a worsening condition—the fever is not breaking but rising—you have to admit a sickness. And so the polls, the most striking of which this week was CBS’s, which says only 13% of Americans feel President Obama’s economic plans have helped them. After all the money he and Congress have spent, you’d think it would be twice that.  Read the rest of this entry »

We need your help at the Adams and Broomfield counties Victory office and hope that you all will be able to get out and support ALL of the Republicans on the ticket for November. This is an extremely important election year and we need every able bodied person to get out and show the Democrats what the American People are all about and to send a resonating “ENOUGH” to President Obama and Nancy Pelosi!  Read the rest of this entry »