Free Republic

Obama's Big Media mouthpieces are promoting the Dear Leader's latest talking point on Health Care: "Tax-free" health benefits from employers are actually a "tax break", and as such can be rescinded by The Leader and His Righteous Coven in the Congress.USA Today's Obama media sock puppet Richard Wolf "reports" in today's online rag:Lawmakers target health insurance tax break Congressscum appear to be ready to do a wilding on the health care you earned.

Guess Who Really Pays the Taxes By Stephen Moore From the November/December 2007 Issue Yes, income in America is skewed toward the rich. But taxes are skewed far, far more. The top 5 percent pay well over half the income taxes. STEPHEN MOORE has the numbers. 1. Are income taxes fair?That depends on who is offering the opinion. Democratic candidates for president certainly don’t think so. John Edwards has said, “It’s time to restore fairness to a tax code that has been driven badly out of whack.” Hillary Clinton laments that “middle-class and working families are paying a much higher percentage...

Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure.“In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.”In the email, Ta noted that older congressional staffs may leave their jobs because of the...

Frustrated Democrats have been asking the same question for months: When are the rich going to pay their fair share? State employee unions are also asking — broadcasting television commercials depicting wealthy fat-cats smoking cigars and brandishing brandy snifters as Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell has avoided tax increases on the rich and corporations. The unions have spent about $400,000 since February on radio, television and cable advertisements in their campaign for tax fairness. But Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich, says the rich are already paying their fair share. In fact, Greenwich paid more than 14 percent of the state's...

The Senate health-care bill would raise effective marginal tax rates on lower and middle-income singles and families up to 41%. The effective marginal tax rate is the answer to the question: "If I earn $1 more, how much less than $1 do I get to save or spend?" If you can keep that full dollar for your disposal, the effective marginal tax rate is zero. If earning another dollar does not raise your disposable income by even a penny, the effective marginal tax rate is 100 percent. Consider, then, the figure below constructed for a two-earner family with two school-age...

.... The huge tax cuts passed under Presidents Reagan and Bush II (surrounding smaller tax increases under Bush I and Clinton), in the short term, contributed to the largest budget deficits in peacetime U.S. history. In the long term, they undermined the federal government's ability to pay for the social insurance programs that make up the largest part of the federal budget: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But the most remarkable victory of the conservative revolution has been taking tax increases off the policy table, to the point where even letting tax cuts for the very rich expire as scheduled...

A term new to most Americans, "tax expenditures," is being bandied about in Washington as Congress and President Barack Obama discuss ways to bring the federal budget closer to balance. In many discussions it is used interchangeably with a more familiar word, "loopholes." President Obama has been gaining a certain amount of political traction by urging elimination of many loopholes. He and liberals in Congress prefer to focus attention on tax breaks for big corporations and "the rich." That last needs to be qualified by noting that under one of the president's proposals, families earning $250,000 or more a year...

Nothing has been more damaging to rational discourse about economic policy than the notion, peddled relentlessly by Republican conservatives and accepted by too many centrist Democrats, that raising taxes is always and everywhere bad for the economy. Mind you, there's very little evidence supporting this view -- it's an article of faith and a convenient way for politicians to pander to their constituents. Reality is a whole lot more complicated. The economic impact of a given tax increase can be positive or negative, depending on who is taxed, how the tax is structured and how the tax revenue is used....

Fiscal Policy: President Obama is putting all his political chips on raising the minimum wage to 10.10 an hour, but so far that issue isn't gaining much political traction. The 500,000 job losses confirmed last week by the Congressional Budget Office certainly were a mortal wound to the legislative push — as well they should be when we have nearly 20 million Americans already unemployed or underemployed. But most Americans have a much bigger concern than raising the minimum wage. Only about 5% of workers make that little (the average is well above $20 an hour), and most receiving the...

Obamacare has delivered another sucker punch to the middle class. This time it’s sticker shock. Now that a few people can get past the tech problems of HealthCare.gov and actually see the real cost of insurance plans available, they are finding that Affordable Care is big hit to the family budget. And when the family budget gets hit in the solar plexus, guess what happens to consumer spending and the economy. In California, policies for about 900,000 Californians are being canceled because of Obamacare’s mandates and about 2/3rd of these do not qualify for subsidies, according to The Chicago Tribune....

Example: You receive $5000.00 in medical insurance from your employer. At a 25% tax rate you will owe an additional $1250.00 in taxes.

Get ready to be blindsided by a barrage of new taxes. $1 trillion worth... They'll be coming courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. And they won't just be affecting those who make over $250,000. The bulk of these taxes will be passed on directly to the middle class. That's because while a majority of these "stealth taxes" were designed to be taxes on businesses, they're actually transferred directly to ordinary citizens. They include the investment income surtax, a Medicare payroll tax, even a "tanning tax" on those who utilize indoor tanning services. "Many of those [hidden]...

The Congressional Budget Office just confessed that the healthcare law passed by Democrats and only Democrats in 2010—you know the one that was supposed to save us so much money?-- is really a dud, a job killer, as we have said all along. And the consequences aren’t just that some guy you don’t know won’t have a job, the consequences are that guys you DO know won’t have jobs, and --in the best case—your tax bill will go up accordingly. The reform package, derisively known as Obamacare, is going to cost the country an additional 2 million jobs by 2017...

Americans will pay an average premium of $328 monthly for a mid-tier health insurance plan when the Obamacare health exchanges open for enrollment next week, and most will qualify for government subsidies to lower that price, the Obama administration said on Wednesday. The figure, based on data for approved insurance plans in 48 states, represents the broadest national estimate for how much Americans will pay for health coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law next year. The prices of the new plans are at the heart of a political debate over whether they will be affordable enough to attract...

When Indiana recently announced that individual health insurance costs in Indiana will rise 72 percent on average because of new Affordable Care Act requirements, an immediate outcry followed from some ACA supporters, who accused the Department of Insurance of misrepresenting these numbers in a deliberate attempt to mislead Hoosiers. The DOI provided a lengthy testimony about these numbers before the Indiana Health Finance Commission on July 22, and the DOI stands by its numbers. The fact remains that the Indiana individual health insurance market will see significant increases next year because of ACA. The following is some background about how...

Here comes the ObamaCare tax bill. The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills. But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.” Under ObamaCare, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 will pay an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra...

New Obamacare taxes that were previously kept secret have been unveiled by outraged customers who feel betrayed. Residents in many states have yet to feel the change that will come when President Obama's signature health care program which will go into full effect in January. But Blue Cross Blue Shield subscribers in Alabama got a glimpse of the future when they received their latest bill which had a separate line spelling out how much extra they will have to pay as a result of national health insurance. A local paper, AL.com, obtained a picture from a reader who received a...

The Congressional Budget Office’s warning that the Affordable Care Act will cause employment to fall by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers is just the latest of Obamacare’s negative surprises. Unfortunately, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” is proving to be depressingly accurate. The law’s defenders legitimately argue that it is not sufficient merely to criticize the Affordable Care Act; responsible action requires proposing an alternative. Fortunately, Republicans have a good one, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for the past...

High-income families would be hit with a tax increase on wages and a new levy on investments under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul bill. For the first time, the Medicare payroll tax would be applied to investment income, beginning in 2013. A new 3.8 percent tax would be imposed on interest, dividends, capital gains and other investment income for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000. The bill also would increase the Medicare payroll tax by 0.9 percentage point to 2.35 percent on wages above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples...

A primary rationale of ObamaCare's insurance reforms limiting age-rating and precluding pricing based on health status has been to ensure that people will be able to afford health coverage when they need it most. An IBD analysis finds that middle-class households in their late 50s and early 60s could spend 25% or more of their income on health care — before their deductible is exhausted and ObamaCare's benefits kick in. Covered California's shop-and-compare tool shows that a 58-year-old couple in Los Angeles County with $65,000 in income buying a bronze plan would have to spend $19,400, including $9,400 in premiums...