Obama's $144 Billion Tax Hike

Obama's $144 Billion Tax Hike

via Red County by Kay B. Day on 3/26/09

A tax cut for "95%" of all Americans? Try a tax hike on 100%.

The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan organization with a brain trust that can actually make sense out of the US tax code, has published a report showing that a cap-and-trade system curbing greenhouse gas emissions would place an annual burden of $144.8 billion on American households. The average per household burden is projected at $1,218-about 2 percent of the average household income. The organization issued Working Paper No. 6 on March 17: Who Pays for Climate Policy?

In a thoughtful, well-presented argument, Tax Foundation adjunct scholar Andrew Chamberlain said the burden would be "disproportionately borne by low-income households, those under age 25 and over 75 years, those in southern states, and single parents with dependent children."

Florida's extremely warm, humid summers will certainly send the utility bills soaring.

Chamberlain has more compassion than President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress. He said, "Lawmakers weighing the costs and benefits of climate policy should be aware that cap-and-trade would impose a significant and regressive annual burden on US households."

The adjunct scholar pointed out the fact that legislators often view cap-and-trade as a more politically attractive approach. After all, it doesn't sound as harsh as a federal carbon tax. But the foundation's research supports the conclusion that cap-and-trade certainly "doesn't represent a 'tax-free' way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Considering the amount of controversy surrounding theories Al Gore holds about climate change, formerly referred to as global warming, and weighing in the fact a number of respected scientists disagree with Gore's projections, one possible motive for Obama's approach to global warming is financial. Hedge fund managers and the federal government stand to make a lot of money, as evidenced in Chamberlain's report.

One energy industry executive who wishes to remain anonymous put it bluntly. "The government is creating a new financial bubble. And your average American family is going to get a big surprise when they see what it costs them for energy."

Dissent on global warming was in top form March 10 when the second International Conference on Climate Change confronted the issue, "Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis?" A news release issued by The Heartland Institute after the conference's 700 attendees headed home answered the question. The release said the largest-ever gathering of global warming skeptics responded with "a resounding No.

Referring to "the United Nations' steady beat of global warming alarms magnified by a pliant media," Richard Lindzen, a distinguished professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set the tone of the conference in his keynote address, "However grim things may appear, we eventually will win against anthropogenic global warming alarm, simply because we are right and they are wrong."

Pop media quite naturally ignored the conference. And the tax on carbon isn't the only federal revenue grab from the working class. In a phone interview on March 25, Matt Moon, The Tax Foundation's manager of media relations, said, "It's interesting that Obama promised a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans." Moon pointed out the president has broken that promise once, with the increased tax on cigarettes. That particular tax generally affects lower income quintiles more. Higher taxes on cigarettes have also led to a troublesome black market and runaway organized crime in states like New York.

Regardless of whether Obama and the Congress choose cap-and-trade rather than tax increases on carbon, each will have the same result on US bank accounts. "[e]conomic theory teaches that cap-and-trade and carbon taxes impose nearly identical economic burdens on households," Chamberlain said.

States' rebellion begins to rumble

States' rebellion begins to rumble: "A Minority View Walter Williams States' rebellion begins to rumble
Posted: March 25, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
© 2009

Our Colonial ancestors petitioned and pleaded with King George III to get his boot off their necks. He ignored their pleas, and in 1776, they rightfully declared unilateral independence and went to war. Today it's the same story except Congress is the one usurping the rights of the people and the states, making King George's actions look mild in comparison. Our constitutional ignorance – perhaps contempt, coupled with the fact that we've become a nation of wimps, sissies and supplicants – has made us easy prey for Washington's tyrannical forces. But that might be changing a bit. There are rumblings of a long overdue re-emergence of Americans' characteristic spirit of rebellion.

Eight state legislatures have introduced resolutions declaring state sovereignty under the Ninth and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution; they include Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington. There's speculation that they will be joined by Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.

He shocked the establishment in 2008 – now read Ron Paul's clear-thinking manifesto on constitutional government: The Revolution: A Manifesto


You might ask, 'Isn't the 10th Amendment that no-good states' rights amendment that Dixie governors, such as George Wallace and Orval Faubus, used to thwart school desegregation and black civil rights?' That's the kind of constitutional disrespect and ignorance big-government proponents, whether they're liberals or conservatives, want you to have. The reason is that they want Washington to have total control over our lives. The founders tried to limit that power with the 10th Amendment, which reads: 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'

New Hampshire's 10th Amendment resolution typifies others and, in part, reads: 'That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General (federal) Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.' Put simply, these 10th Amendment resolutions insist that the states and their people are the masters and that Congress and the White House are the servants. Put yet another way, Washington is a creature of the states, not the other way around.

Congress and the White House will laugh off these state resolutions. State legislatures must take measures that put some teeth into their 10th Amendment resolutions. Congress will simply threaten a state, for example, with a cutoff of highway construction funds if it doesn't obey a congressional mandate, such as those that require seat belt laws or that lower the legal blood-alcohol level to .08 for drivers. States might take a lead explored by Colorado.

In 1994, the Colorado Legislature passed a 10th Amendment resolution and later introduced a bill titled 'State Sovereignty Act.' Had the State Sovereignty Act passed both houses of the legislature, it would have required all people liable for any federal tax that's a component of the highway users fund, such as a gasoline tax, to remit those taxes directly to the Colorado Department of Revenue. The money would have been deposited in an escrow account called the 'Federal Tax Fund' and remitted monthly to the IRS, along with a list of payees and respective amounts paid. If Congress imposed sanctions on Colorado for failure to obey an unconstitutional mandate and penalized the state by withholding funds due, say $5 million for highway construction, the State Sovereignty Act would have prohibited the state treasurer from remitting any funds in the escrow account to the IRS. Instead, Colorado would have imposed a $5 million surcharge on the Federal Tax Fund account to continue the highway construction.

The eight state legislatures that have enacted 10th Amendment resolutions deserve our praise, but their next step is to give them teeth."