About that Finance Bill that Webb and Warner Helped Pass...

from HotAir
Expect more fees on more transactions, including paying premium prices for doing business face to face with bank tellers and other employees. Banks will start demanding higher minimum balances and start charging higher fees on accounts that don’t make the cut. Bank of America will lose between $7 and $10 billion just on charges for debit and credit cards alone, money that will get made up by its customers somewhere.

In short, the bill will erode consumer buying power, harm retirement accounts that rely on the performance of financial institutions, and create more unemployment. What exactly did we get in return for all of this? An expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy that spent more time watching porn than protecting consumers the first time around.

Senators Webb and Warner voted Yea for another Obama Bill that will Destroy the Economy and buy off the Unions

Finance bill favors interests of unions, activists
The Price of a Vote " On the very day the Senate passes major bank reform, we learn dozens of senators or Senate employees received VIP loans from a company hip-deep in the subprime loan mess that the bank bill fails to address."
More on the bill here

Does Obama want to Destroy America?

But in his mind he is not trying to destroy America simply because he wants utter destruction and devastation to be the only outcome. You see, mere destruction isn’t his end goal as those on the right fear. In his left-wing ideology, he thinks after America’s fall he and his left-wing comrades will be building a new and better U.S.A. Where real Americans see destruction and the end of everything, the leftists see a re-birth to a better and, in their eyes, more moral America. He and his left-wing friends see the U.S. as a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the bad old days..

read it all at BigGovernment

About the VAT tax that the Dems Are Salivating Over

Investor Business Daily Explains..

In "Impostor," his 2006 critique of George W. Bush's economic policies, Bartlett wrote: "In my view, the VAT lends itself to dealing with our long-term budget problem because it can be raised a little bit at a time without causing serious economic repercussions."

Lovers of big government have long yearned for a VAT, and statements made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi make it clear that she is salivating for its enactment to pay for some of the Democrats' endless spending spree.

How unpopular is the VAT? The best person to ask would have been the late Democrat Al Ullman. As chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee during much of the 1970s, he was one of the most powerful politicians in Washington. But he actually lost the Oregon congressional seat he had held for decades after championing the VAT.

First cooked up by France, the VAT's hidden nature is what gets ordinary Americans justifiably furious when they hear talk of it. Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames, in their new book "How Capitalism Will Save Us," call the VAT "insidious because it imposes an invisible layer of taxation that inflates the cost of living . .. increases the cost of doing business and hits all consumers."

As Hoover Institution flat-tax gurus Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka have warned, a VAT is unacceptable "to most Americans on grounds of equity" because "by taxing consumption from the first dollar at the same rate, it puts a substantial tax burden on the poor." It therefore "is rarely considered as a replacement for the income tax."

But it would also inflict an inflationary assault — the last thing our economy needs right now. "Experience in Europe has made it plain that the incorporation of the VAT in product prices is not just an academic proposition," Hall and Rabushka point out.

"Not only are prices marked up by the amount of the VAT as soon as the tax goes into place," the economists add, "but there are second and third rounds of inflation as wages respond to higher prices through cost-of-living escalation. In 1979, when Britain raised its VAT rate while cutting income tax rates, a burst of inflation crippled the economy for several years."

The statists now running Washington are too in love with income taxes to replace them with a VAT; it's an added value-added tax they want, starting at a "painlessly" low rate, then growing like a cancer.

Pay Up Suckers

A VAT Tax Will Help Create a Permanent Dependent Class
This is liberalism's goal in overturning Reaganism and lying about tax cuts.

"The problem with the deficits is not insufficient taxation. The problem
with the deficits is out-of-control spending by the Obama regime." -Rush Limbaugh

Paul Volcker says we need a Value Added Tax ( VAT ), which is a tax on Everything, to pay for the Democrats spending spree.

Volcker: Taxes likely to rise eventually to tame deficit

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States should consider raising taxes to help bring deficits under control and may need to consider a European-style value-added tax, White House adviser Paul Volcker said on Tuesday.

Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax "was not as toxic an idea" as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. "If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said.

Look Where The Country is Headed

Study: California Public Pensions Underfunded by Over $500B
The study examined:
The California Public Employees' Retirement System;
The California State Teachers' Retirement System; and
The University of California's retirement system (Walters, "Capitol Alert," Sacramento Bee, 4/5).

It's time we get rid of these public unions before they destroy the country. Why should we work to pay for their retirement?

Steve Forbes says Obama is a failure

Steve Forbes

With an ice-cold disdain for public opinion and an obsession worthy of Lenin, President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi rammed ObamaCare through the House by unprecedented parliamentary trickery, bribery and deceit. The President has thereby poisoned the national political well.The President will discover that, ultimately, the American people's tenacity will overwhelm his--and he will be a failed President

HAS THE GOVERNMENT BECOME A BULLY?

Read the whole thing and then PASS IT ON

Let us count the ways.....

They all but nationalized the American auto industry (save Ford), overriding debtor rights and decades of law. They have also taken over chunks of the financial industry and, via their control over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, much of the housing industry. Many salaries will be set by the White House. Education, a local matter, is increasingly becoming a federal one. The student loan industry has also been brought in-house
The smash-and-grab style of governing has since run rampant: rules, regulations, taxes, and mandates; the proliferation of unelected czars; the orders and commands; the abuse of power; the diktats-all stuffed down our throats.

Does it feel like we are all being waterboarded?

The Department of Justice has hired a legion of lawyers for its Civil Rights Division. They will be busy investigating businesses across America for violations of civil rights laws. Fine -- but they will be using what is called a "disparate impact" standard. Under that criterion, any business that has job standards -- even legitimate ones -- that happen to result in fewer minorities being hired than the DOJ sees fit will be hit with the full might of the Justice Department, which has been staffed with a coven of radical lawyers. Not to be outdone, the Education Department will also be sending out investigators to ensure that schools do not discriminate, either. Discrimination is often in the eye of the beholder, and under Eric Holder, I can guarantee you that those eyes will see racism across the breadth of America (because, after all, we are a nation of racists). Businesses, local government, schools -- all will be bullied in the years ahead.

But wait...there's more.

The Environmental Protection Agency has gone mental -- off the deep end

7 LIES in Under 2 Minutes

It's NOT about HealthCare

IT'S ABOUT CREATING STRONGER UNIONS

from BIG GOVERNMENT

Among the SEIU sops in the bill are vast new funding mechanisms for home health care organizations. The union has focused on unionizing home health care workers and now the taxpayers will provide hundreds of millions each year to pay these new union members.
The bill also provides $10 billion in direct taxpayer subsidies to pay health care costs for retired union members. This foists the every increasing health care cost of no-longer productive members off on the treasury.

In addition, it sets up all sorts of government bodies to micro-manage the health care industry to the advantage of labor. These bodies will make regulations for the workplace, training and wage levels. They will also serve as “diversity panels” and will be empowered to seek appropriate participation in health care jobs for disadvantaged groups. Buried in Title II, Part 3, Subtitle D of the bill is the requirement that the HHS panel that will set standards for health care employment must have union (read SEIU, the biggest health industry union) representation.

The bill also ties big piles of grant money to unionization. In Title V, Subtitle D, which funds grants for nurse training, the bill limits eligibility for funding to employers that “provides wages and benefits to its nurses…that have been collectively bargain with a labor organization.”
These little set asides tucked away in the bill will strengthen SEIU’s hand by helping it unionize more of the health care workforce and provide billions in funding for those new union jobs. They also allow labor to infiltrate the regulatory process and push for further advantages.

The simple truth is that for the single biggest advocacy bloc pushing the health care bill, your health is the furthest thing from their mind. Their objective is to use the bill to make it easier to unionize health care workers, which certainly won’t enhance patient care, and to advance the larger goals of organized labor as a whole, and use the resulting debt from the administration to push through the noxious “card check” bill through despite public opposition.