I confess that I do not fully understand the possible impacts of this giant game of financial chicken that is being played with the debt ceiling, but the insistence on raising taxes further is infuriating and ideologically blind.

We should recall the taxes that have already been raised. As the Wall Street Journal online noted in Taxes Upon Taxes Upon… (June 11, 2011):

• Starting in 2013, the bill  (The Health Care Bill) adds an additional 0.9% to the 2.9% Medicare tax for singles who earn more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000.

• For first time, the bill also applies Medicare’s 2.9% payroll tax rate to investment income, including dividends, interest income and capital gains. Added to the 0.9% payroll surcharge, that means a 3.8-percentage point tax hike on “the rich.” Oh, and these new taxes aren’t indexed for inflation, so many middle-class families will soon be considered rich and pay the surcharge as their incomes rise past $250,000 due to tax-bracket creep. Remember how the Alternative Minimum Tax was supposed to apply only to a handful of millionaires?

Taxpayer cost over 10 years: $210 billion.

• Also starting in 2013 is a 2.3% excise tax on medical device manufacturers and importers. That’s estimated to raise $20 billion.

• Already underway this year is the new annual fee on “branded” drug makers and importers, which will raise $27 billion.

• Another $15.2 billion will come from raising the floor on allowable medical deductions to 10% of adjusted gross income from 7.5%.

• Starting in 2018, the bill imposes a whopping 40% “excise tax” on high-cost health insurance plans. Though it only applies to two years in the 2010-2019 window of ObamaCare’s original budget score, this tax would still raise $32 billion—and much more in future years.

• And don’t forget a new annual fee on health insurance providers starting in 2014 and estimated to raise $60 billion. This tax, like many others on this list, will be passed along to consumers in higher health-care costs.

There are numerous other new taxes in the bill, all adding up to some $438 billion in new revenue over 10 years. But even that is understated because by 2019 the annual revenue increase is nearly $90 billion, or $900 billion in the 10 years after that. Yet Mr. Obama wants to add another $1 trillion in new taxes on top of this.

HKO Comments:

And do not exclude the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, which is Orwellian speak for tax hikes.  To insist on further tax hikes on top of this is pure lunacy.  To ignore that we have one of the highest corporate tax rates is blind. Even Bill Clinton noted the need to lower corporate tax rates.

How does one rationally reconcile the thought that the government injecting money into the economy is stimulative but individuals getting to keep and spend more of their own money is not?

The debate between spending cuts and tax hikes is, like all political choices, a false choice. There is a  third alternative to raising taxes or cutting spending: growing the economy.  Neal Boortz commented that if we grew the economy 5% a year, raised no new taxes and made no further cuts in spending  (but did not increase spending) we could resolve the looming deficit issue.

But growing the economy requires reducing government intrusions and regulations that have stifled business growth. It also means delivering tax laws that can be trusted not to change every election cycle.

I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you occupy, adding more taxes to the mass already passed with record unemployment and a very sluggish economy is just reckless and  foolish.  Focusing this dire dilemma on the proper depreciation of corporate jets and threatening Social Security recipients is partisan political posturing and class warfare at its worst.

268,00 new jobs were added last month.

62,000 of  those jobs, almost 1/4, were from McDonald’s.

McDonald’s was one of several large companies to receive a waiver from the new health insurance requirements.

Being careful not to draw too tight a correlation, this raises a question I have raised since the bill passed:  how much is this health care bill affecting unemployment?

We do not know how many jobs McDonald’s would have added anyway, but at least we know that exempting McDonald’s from the onerous health care bill certainly did not kill any jobs.  Only big companies have the political clout to even seek such exemptions. Small businesses which lack such clout, and bear the biggest brunt of this Kafkaesque bill, are also the sector that we depend on the most for job creation.

Dispensing privileged exemptions is the epitome of crony capitalism and the new charge of ‘gangster government’.  I first heard this charge from Michelle Bachman when the new GM was closing automobile dealers and politically connected dealers were appealing to politically connected friends to hold on to their businesses that were being taken by government decree.

I believe the impact on unemployment from the health care bills is grossly underestimated.  If exempting McDonald’s seems to improve employment then let’s just exempt everyone- repeal the damn bill.

It is not difficult to see what must be the consequence when democracy embarks on a course of planning which in its execution requires more agreement than in fact exists.  The people may have agreed on adopting a system of directed economy because they have been convinced that it will produce great prosperity. In the discussions leading to the decision, the goal of planning will have been described by some such term as “common welfare,”  which only conceals the absence of real agreement on the ends of planning .  Agreement will in fact exist only on the mechanism to be used.  But it is a mechanism which can be used only for a common end; and the question of the precise goal toward which all activity is to be directed will arise as soon as the executive plan has to translate the demand for a single plan into a particular plan.  Then it will appear that the agreement on the desirability of planning is not supported by agreement on the ends the plan is to serve. The effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be to rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing on where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

From chapter 5, “Planning and Democracy” from  The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek.  Originally written  in 1944.  This may be the best explanation for the recent political reversal and the revolt against the health care bill. The President presumed an agreement on the ends which rarely occurs in a free society.

Political reform has failed in the past because those who claimed to want change just wanted to throw the other bums out. As long as their bum “brought home the bacon” they remained content. The obvious result of everyone wanting to keep “their” bum was that all of the bums remained.

Scott Brown’s election in to Ted Kennedy’s seat was a watershed event, a warning of what was to come. But the greater indication of a real change was the rejection of Ben Nelson’s acquiescence to the health care plan in exchange for major concessions for his state of Nebraska.  His governor and his voters loudly protested his compromise.

That indicated that the age of pork may be over. The voters make have rejected the old pork barrel politics for the sake of the greater good. In fact the blatant payoffs and coercion used to pass the vastly unpopular bill was as damaging as the bill itself.  By pushing too far the administration has caused rejection for both the means and the end.

It is a common political axiom that one does not want to see how laws and sausage are made.  Perhaps this change will merit a bigger change than just another swing of the political pendulum.

I do not pretend to speak for the other voters.  I was fortunate to be traveling during much of October so I missed most of the trash and noise masquerading as campaign information.  I truly do not care about college pranks, high school indiscretions, or even disagreements on some interpretations of constitutional intentions. I don’t care if you have made a bad loan or business decision in your life, if you were divorced, if you served in Viet Nam, what you read or what you don’t read.  I don’t care if someone in your family cured cancer, won the Nobel Prize or was convicted of rape.

I don’t care what position you played on the high school or college football team. I don’t believe any candidate hates children, the elderly, baseball, women, or poor people.  I don’t care what your religion is or isn’t, how often you go to church, or whether you teach Sunday school.

I don’t care if you smoked pot in college or got a DUI 20 years ago.

What I do care is that:

You will vote against the Union Card Check Bill.

You will vote against Cap and Trade.

You will vote to repeal the Health Care Bill.

You will vote for sane regulation rather than government micromanagement of industry and the economy.

You recognize that no group of elites understands the economy as much as all of the American consumers and producers do.

You respect the citizens who know better how to run their lives and their families than anybody in Washington.

You will think long and hard before your send Americans to die on foreign soil, or interfere in the affairs of other nations.

You recognize that we are a nation of laws; not a nation of ideologies.