Starting Jan. 1, 2012, Form 1099s will become a means of reporting to the Internal Revenue Service the purchases of all goods and services by small businesses and self-employed people that exceed $600 during a calendar year. Precious metals such as coins and bullion fall into this category and coin dealers have been among those most rankled by the change.This provision, intended to mine what the IRS deems a vast reservoir of uncollected income tax, was included in the health care legislation ostensibly as a way to pay for it. The tax code tweak is expected to raise $17 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
via Gold Coin Dealers Decry New Tax Law – ABC News.
According to a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) the annual bill to U.S. taxpayers for illegal immigration is $100 billion and about 75 percent of the total is borne by state and local taxpayers. In Kansas that bill is estimated to be $442 million a year.
via Study: Illegal Immigrants Cost Kansas Taxpayers $442 million.
New Jersey would close its centralized car inspection lanes and motorists would pay for their own emissions tests under a sweeping set of recommendations set to be released by the Christie administration today.
State parks, psychiatric hospitals and even turnpike toll booths could also be run by private operators, according to the 57-page report on privatization obtained by The Star-Ledger. Preschool classrooms would no longer be built at public expense, state employees would pay for parking and private vendors would dish out food, deliver health care and run education programs behind prison walls.
All told, the report says, New Jersey could save at least $210 million a year by delivering an array of services through private hands.
via NorthJersey.com: Christie looks to privatize motor vehicle inspections, other services.
President Obama intends to bypass Congress and appoint Dr. Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid, the White House announced Tuesday — filling the job while Congress is in recess to get around Republican opposition that threatened to derail Berwick’s confirmation.
Berwick’s supporters say he is the right man in the right place at the right time. But his opponents have lined up against him. They say that while he may be a the highly respected doctor, he is also an outspoken proponent of the British health care system, which they say is all wrong for Americans.
via FOXNews.com – Obama to Fill Medicare and Medicaid Post Without Senate Approval.
After Obama waited more than 70 (yes, seventy..) days to allow other countries to help clean up the oil in the water, Scientists are now confronting growing evidence that BP‘s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted “dead zones” where fish and other marine life cannot survive.
In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as “astonishingly high” levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.
via Biologists find ‘dead zones’ around BP oil spill in Gulf | Environment | The Guardian.
If this keeps up this might really start to affect Obama’s partying, golfing and vacationing.
The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible.
U.S. was odd-man out at the G-20 meeting over the weekend, continuing to call for more government spending in the face of European resistance.
The contrast with President Reagan‘s antirecession and pro-growth measures in 1981 is striking. Reagan reduced marginal and corporate tax rates and slowed the growth of non-defense spending. Recovery began about a year later. After 18 months, the economy grew more than 9% and it continued to expand above trend rates.
Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics.
via Allan Meltzer: Why Obamanomics Has Failed – WSJ.com.
Two weeks ago Kerry was pitching that cap-and-trade would create more green jobs than would be lost. This was despite past real-life scenarios where green jobs cost the economy on average 2.2 jobs for every green job created.
via Coal jobs casualty of green policies.
Entitled “Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here”, it is a warfare manual for defeating economic slumps by use of extreme monetary stimulus once interest rates have dropped to zero, and implicitly once governments have spent themselves to near bankruptcy.
The speech is best known for its irreverent one-liner: “The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
via RBS tells clients to prepare for ‘monster’ money-printing by the Federal Reserve – Telegraph.
How will our government do when they administer medical care to everyone except themselves and the unions?…
California Medi-Cal officials paid $273,000 to health providers who claimed to have rendered care to 35 dead people, raising questions about the agency’s accounting and potential health provider fraud.
via State paid for medical care to the dead | California Watch.
Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, says that flawed policies are used to fix other flawed policies. For example, for price controls to work, an individual mandate is required; but for a mandate to work, more taxpayer subsidies are necessary. But what happens when the central planners’ calibrations are off? Younger and poorer adults who stay in the health insurance market will be cross-subsidizing the premiums of older and wealthier Americans not yet eligible for Medicare. From the “have nots” to the “haves”—a new social policy.
via Welcome to the Real World: Grim Prospects for Young Adults under Obamacare | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News..
