Thread: Paying for Obamacare, Debt: VAT?

Charles Krauthammer brought up this point on a news show today -- that the feds could go the Euro route and implement a national sales tax to pay for its spending. Sure, what's 1%? Then as years go by, it will just go up and up. Scary. But, another bureaucracy to stuff with union members, including those who will oversee VAT refunds to poor folks. It's just a thought, but it could go this way so the feds don't have to raise income taxes.

^ I haven't heard any serious debate about creating a VAT tax. Is there disscussion about this?

I do agree Jet, that once it's implemented, like any tax, that it will increase and increase and increase.

I'm sure the cost of these health care plans pale into insignificance when you consider how much money the Iraq/Afghan wars have cost, just how much is the running total for that now???

Originally Posted by buriramboy

how much is the running total for that now???

Guess it depends on what is included but here's a running (very rapid) total.

COSTOFWAR.COM - The Cost of War

Originally Posted by Milkman

^ I haven't heard any serious debate about creating a VAT tax. Is there discussion about this?

I do agree Jet, that once it's implemented, like any tax, that it will increase and increase and increase.

No, just heard Krauthammer mention it and it chilled me to the bone. It's an easy revenue generator, so I reckon the Dems might use it. Obama has to tour the nation and ensure the people that they will love HC reform. He's got another couple of years to suck more money from them.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

I'm sure the cost of these health care plans pale into insignificance when you consider how much money the Iraq/Afghan wars have cost, just how much is the running total for that now???

Ya, what's a couple of trillion for healthcare. Hmm, how much did WWI and II cost them? And when did the UK pay them back for its loans? Or has this been paid back?

How about a special tax on size 14 and above women's clothing and waist size 38 and above men's clothing. How about more taxes on cigarettes. How about taxing sugared beverages?

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

And when did the UK pay them back for its loans? Or has this been paid back?

Last year. All paid back.

Heh...I think the best way to pay for Comrade Obama's so-called 'health-care BS is to start up some political re-education camps where anything but pure leftist, Marxist thought is allowed. Model it after HCMC (Saigon) - a sure fire winner!

Originally Posted by Humbert

How about a special tax on size 14 and above women's clothing and waist size 38 and above men's clothing. How about more taxes on cigarettes. How about taxing sugared beverages?

can we make it size 40 on the men's wear? I'm already subsidizing enough of the free loaders and have always paid my own way.

what I truely can nut understand is why and how the politicians are able to exempt themselves from participating. I mean if their plan is good enough for some, why not the crafters of this great bill. it is all bravo sierra and a sham.

Remove income tax completely and tax peoples consumption instead.

Originally Posted by Humbert

How about a special tax on size 14 and above women's clothing and waist size 38 and above men's clothing. How about more taxes on cigarettes. How about taxing sugared beverages?

You know that's not a bad idea. Parents with tubby children should pay more too. Hey, let's tax the ugly. Or set up a panel of judges to rate all the women 1 to 10. All under 7 go to the military .. as drone pilots. I know, drones have no pilots but that's the idea.

None of this includes me but I like it. We need the pharms although they're dogs. We need the insurance companies although they're whores. If we earn less than 80,000$ we don't have to do shit and the greedy get their money, except it doesn't come from me or mine, we earn under 80 thousand, it comes from the middle class. They're well used to takin it up the arse. That'll teach them what keeping up with the Jones' gets you.

I jerk off to Glen Beck. Something wrong with that? He's cute and he's Mormon. That moves me.

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

And when did the UK pay them back for its loans? Or has this been paid back?

Last year. All paid back.

Txs. 65 yr loan? Any interest paid?

Originally Posted by Camel Toe

Originally Posted by Humbert

How about a special tax on size 14 and above women's clothing and waist size 38 and above men's clothing. How about more taxes on cigarettes. How about taxing sugared beverages?

You know that's not a bad idea. Parents with tubby children should pay more too. Hey, let's tax the ugly. Or set up a panel of judges to rate all the women 1 to 10. All under 7 go to the military .. as drone pilots. I know, drones have no pilots but that's the idea.

That'll come now that they get free HC. The govt will now decide lifestyles by taxing whatever they think is bad. Hey, like the NY city councilman who wants to ban salt.

Originally Posted by njdesi

How about some of you geniuses actually read the bill? Or will having an informed opinion make your Fox news addled brains explode. Let me save you some time:
-A medicare payroll tax on unearned income for families making more than 250K or 200K for individuals -- yes, tax the crap out of the over-achievers who invest their savings for retirement
-40% excise tax on "Cadillac" plans (see bill for specifics) yes, that kicks in in 2018 or something, no? Specially deferred for union members with these plans
-10% tanning tax -- yes, that's gonna rake in billions while putting those big tanning corporations out of business
-An individual mandate that will increase total premium which will offset increased cost resulting from insurance companies not being able to deny for pre-existing conditions or spending limits. yes, increased premiums. What is "spending limits?" Pre-exisiting conditions for kids now, adults later. "Kids" can stay on mummy & daddy's insurance plan until they are 26.
Funding for community healthcare centres that will provide abortions.

For information on savings, go to the CBO website...I have reviewed the CBO numbers. In my opinion, they are too conservative in the potential cost savings. It's not a perfect bill, but it does alleviate some of the cost uncertainties with ever increasing premiums and inadequate coverage.
Or just keeping listening to Fox News and jerking off to Ayn Rand.

You think MSNBC and other msm give you the facts? You are correct that the CBO #s are too conservative, because the Dems' input #s are wrong. Double-counting for medicare, use of social security funds...you really should watch some Fox news (not the 3 opinion shows) to get the correct info. Check Rep Paul Ryan's numbers, see Charles Krauthammer's opinions.

-A medicare payroll tax on unearned income for families making more than 250K or 200K for individuals -- yes, tax the crap out of the over-achievers who invest their savings for retirement

All the people earning passive income are going to throw a tantrum and stop investing in US securities because the 3.8% tax burden on their investments is so onerous. What is the marginal tax rate in which tax cuts are in equilibrium with increased revenue? Do you acknowledge any finite limits to the Laffer Curve?

-40% excise tax on "Cadillac" plans (see bill for specifics) yes, that kicks in in 2018 or something, no? Specially deferred for union members with these plans

What is so strange about delaying the provisions of a bill? Did the compromise result in the bill being passed? Will this result in cost savings for the average citizen?

-10% tanning tax -- yes, that's gonna rake in billions while putting those big tanning corporations out of business

I would argue that we also have sin taxes on smokes and alcohol because of the negative impact like skin cancer in the case of tanning salons. I am ambivalent about this. I don't mind seeing scumbag Eye-Talian North Jersey Soprano wannabes and John Boehners of the world dying off early from their stupidity.

-An individual mandate that will increase total premium which will offset increased cost resulting from insurance companies not being able to deny for pre-existing conditions or spending limits. yes, increased premiums. What is "spending limits?" Pre-exisiting conditions for kids now, adults later. "Kids" can stay on mummy & daddy's insurance plan until they are 26.
Funding for community healthcare centres that will provide abortions.

Spending limits are a cap on how much the insurance company is willing to pay for your treatments before cutting you off from coverage. Read the fine print of your policy if you are an American. Increased premiums means overall increase in the number of people paying premiums.
I want to go into that point further because it shows a fundamental difference in how progressives and Libertarian, conservatives view the world. The latter believe in a form of circular logic in which anything that maximizes profit is inherently good and thus produces the best benefit for society. Progressives like myself know that their can exist a conflict of interest between whats best in terms of profit motive and society as a whole. I work in an auto insurance company and know a lot about how our incentive system works and constraints put on us by society, which IMO help to stabilize the market and provide a level playing field. I can go into specifics, but before you question my expertise, I know how the accounting works, the underwriting process, the resolution of BI, PIP, UIM, Reinsurance Claims, etc. Health care in the US works on the same model with a few tweaks. I don't think it is a perfect bill, but is light years ahead of Republican bullshit. What is their idea? Tort Reform and.....nothing?

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by buriramboy

how much is the running total for that now???

Guess it depends on what is included but here's a running (very rapid) total.

COSTOFWAR.COM - The Cost of War

Iraq: 747 billion to date, due to double in 10 years .

Obamacare will reduce the Deficit over time, as attested to by the CBO's conservative figures, which incidentally do not consider any further cost cuts and efficiencies that will surely follow now that some kind of national health care system is finally being enacted.

Right now the problem is paying for the Bush administrations unfunded wars, unfunded Medicare drugs subsidisation for Seniors, and of course the calamitous financial crisis inherited from Bush. There are several options for the US government to rein in it's Deficit and pay down it's debt over time. I wouldn't necessarily rule out a VAT- and I do prefer Consumption taxation to Income taxation as a rule of thumb- but that doesn't seem to be on the cards right now.

Fiscal responsibility and rectitude will certainly be required, so thank goodness the Democrats are in charge.

We need t check if this is an accurate topic of political hyperbole before the coming elections.

Charles Krauthammer

March 26, 2010

The VAT Cometh
This massive new entitlement needs a cash cow.

the VAT cometh.

With the passage of Obamacare, which created a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind almost universal in Europe is inevitable.

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion[at]–plus doctor fix, the double-counting of Medicare cuts, the ten-six sleight-of-hand (counting ten years of revenue and only six years of outflows) — is, at minimum, a $2 trillion new entitlement.

Link & Entire: The VAT Cometh - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

Op-Ed Columnist - The Rage Is Not About Health Care - NYTimes.com

By FRANK RICH
Published: March 27, 2010
THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

•

Correction: Timothy Geithner’s title at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was president and chief executive officer, not chairman, as I wrote here last week.

Originally Posted by njdesi

How about some of you geniuses actually read the bill? Or will having an informed opinion make your Fox news addled brains explode. Let me save you some time:
-A medicare payroll tax on unearned income for families making more than 250K or 200K for individuals
-40% excise tax on "Cadillac" plans (see bill for specifics)
-10% tanning tax
-An individual mandate that will increase total premium which will offset increased cost resulting from insurance companies not being able to deny for pre-existing conditions or spending limits.

For information on savings, go to the CBO website, review the statistical assumptions and adjust accordingly. Since I am an American citizen and this directly impacts me and my family, I have reviewed the CBO numbers. In my opinion, they are too conservative in the potential cost savings. It's not a perfect bill, but it does alleviate some of the cost uncertainties with ever increasing premiums and inadequate coverage.

Or just keeping listening to Fox News and jerking off to Ayn Rand.

2.5% of your income for refusing insurance... Lets not forget the jail time if you dont want insurance......
Children covered until age 26 on parents plan....

"
HIGH-COST INSURANCE Starting in 2018, employers that offer workers pricier plans — or those with total premiums of $10,200 or more for singles and $27,500 for families — would be subject to a 40 percent tax on the excess premium, said C. Clinton Stretch, managing principal of tax policy at Deloitte. Retirees and workers in high-risk professions like firefighting would have higher thresholds ($11,850 for singles, or $30,950 for families), pegged to inflation.

Although the taxes would be levied on the insurer, experts expect the assessment to be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher premiums or reduced benefits."
For Consumers, Some Clarity on Health Care Changes - NYTimes.com

Hmmm I guess we should all just be happy that we are gonna be covered right...?
I mean after all it doesn't matter if you treat your body like a gutter and catch everything under the sun... No one will be able to turn you down for insurances. and well the insurance companies are just gonna pass the cost on to the rest of us in premiums...
The health care bill in its purest form is about exacting control over people and businesses. Then you have all the other garbage they have tagged on to get it passed.....
Please Nacy, harry and barrack do us all a favor and get lost..... we would be better off with out those fools in the government... While your at it take McCain and the rest of the repub party with you....

And for those of you who do live in the states......
Might want to invest in KY Jelly cause as people get a$$ rammed by big brother the price is gonna sky rocket

Originally Posted by sabang

Fiscal responsibility and rectitude will certainly be required, so thank goodness the Democrats are in charge.

Definitely you will be nominated for the most proposterous statement award brother... Good luck I think you have a chance to win with that one.