The Obama tax orgy continues.
He plans on taxing your employer health care benefits:
During last year’s campaign, Barack Obama poured millions of dollars into television ads attacking John McCain for wanting to tax employer-provided health care benefits.
Taxing employer-provided health care benefits, a measure proposed by opponent John McCain, R-Ariz., during the presidential campaign, is now on the table.
But now that Congress is beginning to consider ways to fix the health care system, a concept once pilloried by Obama is being placed on the agenda by a key member of the president’s own party.Under current law, any money spent on employer-provided health plans is excluded entirely from employee’s taxable income.
“That tax provision should be on the table, because it currently is, too regressive. It just skews the system,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. “I do not favor eliminating it. . . But I do think it needs to be trimmed, limited, looked at.”
Taxing health benefits will be front and center Tuesday when Baucus convenes a roundtable discussion with health-care experts on “Financing Comprehensive Health Care Reform.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Business/story?id=7562814&page=1
And your soft drinks:
Senate leaders are considering new federal taxes on soda and other sugary drinks to help pay for an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system.
The taxes would pay for only a fraction of the cost to expand health-insurance coverage to all Americans and would face strong opposition from the beverage industry. They also could spark a backlash from consumers who would have to pay several cents more for a soft drink.
On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee is set to hear proposals from about a dozen experts about how to pay for the comprehensive health-care overhaul that President Barack Obama wants to enact this year. Early estimates put the cost of the plan at around $1.2 trillion. The administration has so far only earmarked funds for about half of that amount.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based watchdog group that pressures food companies to make healthier products, plans to propose a federal excise tax on soda, certain fruit drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and ready-to-drink teas. It would not include most diet beverages. Excise taxes are levied on goods and manufacturers typically pass them on to consumers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124208505896608647.html
But rest assured the government knows how to spend it:
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.
Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as “female sex workers”–or FSW–and their handlers as “gatekeepers.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=47976
Raising taxes on the “rich”, paying for the health, education, and welfare of the “poor” and illegals, pork barrel projects, and bailing out failing corporations is causing the entire country to go bankrupt.
Oh, and by the way, Social Security and Medicare are in serious trouble:
The financial health of Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two biggest benefit programs, have worsened because of the severe recession, and Medicare is now paying out more than it receives. Trustees of the programs said Tuesday that Social Security will start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2016, one year sooner than projected last year, and the giant trust fund will be depleted by 2037, four years sooner.
Medicare is in even worse shape. The trustees said the program for hospital expenses will pay out more in benefits than it collects this year and will be insolvent by 2017, two years earlier than the date projected in last year’s report.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the head of the trustees group, said the new reports were a reminder that “the longer we wait to address the long-term solvency of Medicare and Social Security, the sooner those challenges will be upon us and the harder the options will be.”
“Address the solvency”….Translation: More and higher taxes.
Geithner said that Obama was committed to working with Congress to find ways to control runaway growth in both public and private health care expenditures, noting the promise Monday by major health care providers to trim costs by $2 trillion over the next decade.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D984SK7O0&show_article=1&catnum=3
Everything gets ‘trimmed’ except feckless spending.
The U.S. is facing a humungous deficit, and the economy is spiraling down into a depresssion.
Yet, most of the MSM and the braindead people who voted this socialist pimp into office continue to give him a pass.
How’s that change working out for you?