Here it comes; an added 6.5% ‘consumption’ sales taxes on top of the income tax to feed the government’s credit card furnished by the Federal Reserve. Americans were not stupid enough to believe Chairman Zero’s debt commission was going to do anything resembling the tenets of the Constitution and cut federal overreach and spending; just add more taxes to the already over-burdened corporate owned moos.
I am sure we will be hearing more about this in the next few days.
And now some wisdom from Ron Paul about the ineptitude of the Federal Reserve, and why we should abolish the banking mafia and the IRS.
We did not want the bailouts, the takeover of the car companies, the porkulus, the budget, and healthcare because we knew we could not afford it. They passed these immense amounts of spending anyway; “because they had to”. Now Barry is attempting to be ‘not-so-much’ for something before he crams this down our throats right after healthcare.
We must flip this congress and neuter this Europe emulating freak before he plunges us into a morass that we will have a very hard time extricating ourselves from. Do not let yourselves be led astray when they say this new VAT is to pay off the deficit or the debt. How many times have they lied to us in the past? It is just another revenue stream.
Paul Volker is expecting a European VAT and a Carbon Tax to be put in place on top of the current income tax structure to pay for all the government’s spending for decades past. No BIG FREAKIN’ surprise there. I and many other Tea Party Patriots are going to be screaming “DON’T YOU DARE!” after months of telling these bozos to ‘STOP SPENDING MONEY!” The only question now is do we have enough time to stop this congress and neuter this pResident?
(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.
If you have not yet read this piece from Stewart Dougherty; better get on that right NOW! What follows is just the smallest tidbit to get you motivated to understand the math behind what is occurring with the siphoning of trillions of dollars in wealth away from Americans.
Thanks to the endless barrage of feel-good propaganda that daily assaults the American mind, best epitomized a few months ago by the “green shoots,” everything’s-coming-up-roses propaganda touted by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the citizens have no idea how disastrous the country’s fiscal, monetary and economic problems truly are. Nor do they perceive the rapidly increasing risk of a totalitarian nightmare descending upon the American Republic.
One stark and sobering way to frame the crisis is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.
According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent report on wealth, America’s private net worth was $53.4 trillion as of September, 2009. But at the same time, America’s debt and unfunded liabilities totaled at least $120,000,000,000,000.00 ($120 trillion), or 225% of the citizens’ net worth. Even if the government expropriated every dollar of private wealth in the nation, it would still have a deficit of $66,600,000,000,000.00 ($66.6 trillion), equal to $214,286.00 for every man, woman and child in America and roughly 500% of GDP. If the government does not directly seize the nation’s private wealth, then it will require $389,610 from each and every citizen to balance the country’s books. State, county and municipal debts and deficits are additional, already elephantine in many states (e.g., California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York) and growing at an alarming rate nationwide. In addition to the federal government, dozens of states are already bankrupt and sinking deeper into the morass every day.
Start your engines. Nancy was talking about a Value Added Tax months ago and today the New York Times has released what appears to be the trial balloon article showing congress’ reluctance to have a VAT, but who may be forced to impose one because of out of control government spending, the $2.5 Trillion Senate Democrats’ health care bill, and the massive ballooning deficit. The entire article has some very good information, but I am just posting the relevant excerpts.
Nancy Pelosi being interviewed by Charlie Rose at the beginning of October, 2009:
Runaway federal deficits have thrust a politically unsavory savior into the spotlight: a nationwide tax on goods and services.
Members of Congress, like their constituents, are squeamish about such ideas, instead suggesting spending cuts or higher taxes on the rich. But with a lack of political will to do the former, and a practical ceiling to how much revenue can be milked from the latter, economists across the political spectrum say a consumption tax may be inevitable once the economy fully recovers.
“We have to start paying our bills eventually,” said Charles E. McLure, a tax economist who worked in the Reagan administration. “This strikes me as the best and most obvious way of doing it.”
The favored route of economists is known as a value-added tax, which is a tax on goods and services that is collected at every step along the production chain, from raw material to a consumer’s shopping bag. Similar to a sales tax, it generally results in consumers paying more for the things they buy. The revenues could be used to pay for health care or other social programs, or just to pay down existing debt.
Since Barry, Harry, and Nancy are following the European model of socialism, it will not be a surprise when they add this on top of the existing tax structure just as they are following the UK’s model of socialized medicine. If you still believe that a single payer health care system is not in the works, I have some very worthwhile bad assets to sell you.
To some foes of big government, though, the efficiency of the tax is also its fatal flaw. Conservatives worry that it enables the government to raise money with such little effort that it will encourage Washington to spend even more.
On the other hand, liberals are wary of value-added taxes because they are regressive. Poor people spend a higher portion of their income buying things than the rich, meaning lower-income people would be disproportionately hurt.
That is why countries often make other major changes to their tax code at the same time.
In Australia, the government imposed a value-added tax in the middle of an overhaul of the system in 2000, which included making the income tax system more progressive. “Many countries with VATs have income taxes that start out at higher income thresholds,” said James Poterba, an economics professor at M.I.T. Combining a broad-based VAT with a steeply progressive income tax, he said, avoids affecting the poor too much.
And here is the “take your medicine” quote.
Such political hurdles, along with a still-tentative economic recovery, make a consumption tax — or a tax increase of any kind — unlikely in the immediate future. But with economists like Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard predicting that federal tax revenues will need to rise by 20 to 30 percent in the next few years, politicians may hold their noses and decide this tax is the least worst option.
After everything we have seen of the Barry, Harry, and Nancy show, it is very hard to believe that they are here to help and not take every single dollar of compensation for our labors. I cannot wait to fire this “do the extreme level of harm ‘with prejudice'” congress in 2010.
