Fines for failing to get health insurance

Under this proposal, if you do nothing else than simply be, you will face a fine. Income taxes are based on your act of earning money for work. Property taxes are a result of your state of owning something. Sales taxes are based on the behavior of purchasing something. Now, if you are simply nothing more than a living American, you may be fined if you don’t buy health insurance.

They’re comparing this to compulsory auto insurance laws, but you only are subject to that if you exercise the privilege of driving a car. This is different in that by exercising the right to life, you will be subject to special taxation.

Awesome.

Schadenfreude

But many of those cashing in on the clunkers program are surprised when they get to the treasurer’s office windows. That’s because the government’s rebate of up to $4500 dollars for every clunker is taxable.

"They didn’t realize that would be taxable. A lot of people don’t realize that. So they’re not happy and kind of surprised when they find that out," Nelson said.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Clunkers rebates are income, subject to income taxes.

I’m not in the market for a new car this week, but unfortunately my taxes are subsidizing everybody else’s Cash for Clunkers purchases. You’re welcome.

I’m not in the market for a used car, either. Which is fortunate because every car traded in to the Cash for Clunkers program has to be destroyed, regardless of its condition. So the government is in the process of destroying the used car market in order to subsidize the new car market.

By promising up to $4500 in welfare for anybody who trades in their clunker, the government effectively makes the down payment for people. Low-income folks who would normally buy a used car when they need one are being encouraged to buy more car than they can afford. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the subprime auto industry.

What happens when people figure out that they can’t make the payment on their government-subsidized Prius? I guess it gets repossessed. Their credit is ruined, their car gets taken away, and there aren’t many cheap used cars left in the market because they’ve all been crushed.

Meanwhile, the resale values of the cars people already own or are making the payments on take a nosedive because of the repossessed cars that will flood the market in six months. Immediate, accelerated destruction of wealth. Yay. Furthermore, auto manufacturers have reduced their output this year. Suddenly you have a few million people with “free” money chasing after a limited number of cars. Inflationary pressure? You betcha!

The evidence points to the idea that people have been putting off their car purchases so that they could participate in this program. Similarly, they’re buying these new cars earlier than they normally would in order to partake in this deal. So we’re compressing the sales for the last four months and the next couple of years into a couple of weeks right now. After the Clunkers program ends, car sales are going to drop back down to their normal market rate, which has been significantly low due to the shitty economy. The net benefit to the economy and the industry is zero, only we’ll have spent a couple billion dollars of money the government didn’t have, and there will be a few million used cars destroyed. Woo!

All this is done in the name of saving the planet from the evil internal combustion engine, right? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and all that. Well, the Cash for Clunkers program increases the use of natural resources by subsidizing the energy-intensive process of manufacturing cars. We’re not going to be reusing the cars that were traded in. The government is destroying perfectly good assets that are in working condition in order to force you to buy the cars they’ve decided you need to buy. Yes, the materials will be recycled, but whatever they’re used for in the future will have to be manufactured, which requires more energy, fossil fuels, transportation, yada yada yada. In other words, there’s probably not a big net change in the amount of CO2 produced because of this debacle.

It’s all a waste, unless you happen to need a new car right now. In which case, you’re welcome. Enjoy the new cars I just helped you buy, assholes.

Today, Timmy Turbotax said he “cannot rule out” middle-class tax increases, even though his boss did during the campaign. Fucking guy.

"If we want an economy that’s going to grow in the future, people have to understand we have to bring those deficits down. And it’s going to be difficult, hard for us to do. And the path to that is through health care reform," Geithner said. "We’re not at the point yet where we’re going to make a judgment about what it’s going to take."

None of this makes sense. Obama comes into office and dramatically increases government spending. Then they tell us that WE have to understand that THEY need to bring the deficits down. HUH? Then he has the balls to say that the way to bring the deficits down is through health care reform, which everybody says will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit.

And he presumably said this with a straight face.

We could avoid the deficit increases by not implementing health care reform. Then we wouldn’t need tax increases to pay for it. Then we could cut government spending, and then the deficits would be reduced. But Tiny Tim says the only strategy to combat deficits is to pass health care reform and raise taxes.

It makes no sense. How can people possibly believe this?

The House of Representatives today voted by a very thin margin to enact cap and trade legislation that everybody agrees will directly increase costs of electricity and gasoline for every American, and indirectly increase the costs of everything we build, buy, sell, move or do.  The effect of this legislation is that living our lives and pursuing our dreams will get harder. Our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be harder to enjoy.  Our daily lives will become more expensive.  We’ll have a tougher time giving our kids the opportunities that we’ve had.  We’ll have to work harder and longer in order to retire someday.  We’ll pay more for less.  Our best businesses will have to perform better just to stay competitive, and our marginal businesses will be pushed into failure.  Jobs will be lost.  Our Representatives are building speed bumps for everybody.

Why?  Because some people believe that humans are causing “climate change” by emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.  The climate on the planet has always changed.  There have been ice ages.  There have been warm periods with massive desertification.  There have been intense solar cycles, and there have been times when the sun is very inactive.  There have been volcanic eruptions that toss so much shit into the air that it cools the entire planet for decades.  The last ten years have been remarkable in the LACK of evidence for a change in global temperature, but for some reason the House had to pass this bill with little debate TODAY.

The skepticism over man-made global warming has been swelling for years. Other countries are backing off on their prior climate change policies.  Other countries have NO plan to limit their own potential by enacting this kind of suicidal regulatory regime.  China’s economy is a fraction of the size of America’s, but they emit massive amounts of carbon.  They have no plan to change that, whereas we are on the road to unilaterally crippling ourselves.

This insanity is not new.  We add corn to our gasoline to protect the environment, when it actually reduces engine efficiency, causes engines to fail early, pits food sources against energy sources and drives up costs, and the increased farming puts more pesticides into water supplies.  We buy ugly cars for more money, and the costs don’t offset until almost a decade after driving them under normal use.  Some people have been terrified into the idea that we’re killing ourselves with carbon dioxide by people who have personal stakes in companies that stand to benefit directly from passing legislation to “prevent” it.  If I told you your tits were going to fall off unless you rubbed them down with my special sauce, you’d call bullshit.  But Al Gore makes himself a PowerPoint presentation and everybody’s bowels explode.

The first motive is money.  Political elites have set up a system in which they control the supply of a commodity THAT DOESN’T EXIST, and then tell you you have to buy it or they’ll fine you and make you buy it anyway.

The second motive is envy.  Pointy-headed intellectuals and politicians who think they’re smarter than everybody else, but who have never created or produced anything in their lives, look at the capitalist system and private sector as cheap and materialistic, but they want a piece of that wealth for themselves.  So they spend their lives tearing them down and enacting public policy that transfers private wealth into their public coffers, so that they can give it to who they believe is more “deserving” of it, people who they “approve” of.

The most important motive is power.  Stripping money and influence and power from individuals and from private organizations and funneling it into community organizations and massive, unaccountable government bureaucracies and labor unions and nationalized industries puts THEM in control of the means of production.  THEY control who gets wealthy, THEY control what gets made, who makes it, how it’s used.

Why are environmentalists and their organizations almost exclusively liberal, if not utterly Marxist?  It’s because they see the environmental cause as a route to the acquisition of power.  They see it as a way to instill fear.  Fear causes people to make bad decisions.  And bad decisions are how free people willingly surrender their individual rights.  If you can get people to believe that the world is coming to an end, that its their fault, that they’re going to lose their jobs and their health care, that bankers and Jews are causing it, and then present them with a clean, articulate, hip black friend who can read a teleprompter like nobody’s business and convince them that he has all the answers to their fears?  It’s like shooting poorly-educated, Obama-voting fish in a barrel.

The only way we can prevent this nightmare scenario from unfolding is to get the Senate to stop it.  If I may be coarse for a moment, call or write your goddamned Senator for once in your life.  They might not listen, particularly if you live in an intellectual wasteland like Washington State, but your conscience will be intact, and you and I can share a beer and a hearty laugh together when the bastards are voted out.

Yours,

kodewords.com

PS  Dave Reichert is a mental midget.  It might have only taken him thirty years to catch the Green River Killer, so kudos for that.  But today we all might as well be dead hookers for all Dave cares.  Screw that guy.