Here is another source for the list of 21 ObamaCare taxes coming your way courtesy of Investors Business Daily:
Taxation: The high bench has confirmed that ObamaCare’s individual mandate is a massive tax on the American middle class. But let’s not forget the 20 other new taxes that are embedded in the law.
Though President Obama never sold it as a tax hike, the Supreme Court ruled the mandate is exactly that. Unfortunately, the majority argued it’s legal under Congress’ taxing authority.
Forcing citizens to buy health insurance “is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama insisted in 2009. Earlier, he assured the public that raising taxes on the middle class to support his health care plan was “the last thing we need in an economy like this.” “Folks are already having a tough enough time,” Obama added.
Indeed they are. But his plan, which subsidizes some 30 million uninsured, amounts to a $1.8 trillion whammy on working families. And that’s just for starters.
The court was silent about the 20 other different taxes hidden in ObamaCare, more than half of which affect families earning less than $250,000 a year.
The new taxes, which cost some $675 billion over the next decade, include:
• A 2.3% excise tax on U.S. sales of medical devices that’s already devastating the medical supply industry and its workforce. The levy is a $20 billion blow to an industry that employs roughly 400,000.
Several major manufacturers have been roiled, including: Michigan-based Stryker Corp., which blames the tax for 1,000 layoffs; Indiana-based Zimmer Corp., which cites the tax in laying off 450 and taking a $50 million charge against earnings; Indiana-based Cook Medical Inc., which has scrubbed plans to open a U.S. factory; Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc., which expects an annual charge against earnings of $175 million, and Boston Scientific Corp., which has opted to open plants in tax-friendlier Ireland and China to help offset a $100 million charge against earnings.
• A 3.8% surtax on investment income from capital gains and dividends that applies to single filers earning more than $200,000 and married couples filing jointly earning more than $250,000.
• A $50,000 excise tax on charitable hospitals that fail to meet new “community health assessment needs,” “financial assistance” and other rules set by the Health and Human Services Dept.
• A $24 billion tax on the paper industry to control a pollutant known as black liquor.
• A $2.3 billion-a-year tax on drug companies.
• A 10% excise tax on indoor tanning salons.
• An $87 billion hike in Medicare payroll taxes for employees, as well as the self-employed.
• A hike in the threshold for writing off medical expenses to 10% of adjusted gross income from 7.5%.
• A new cap on flexible spending accounts of $2,500 a year.
• Elimination of the tax deduction for employer-provided prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients.
• An income surtax of 1% of adjusted gross income, rising to 2.5% by 2016, on individuals who refuse to go along with ObamaCare by buying a policy not OK’d by the government.
• A $2,000 tax charged to employers with 50 or more workers for every full-time worker not offered health coverage.
• A $60 billion tax on health insurers.
• A 40% excise tax on so-called Cadillac, or higher cost, health insurance plans.
All told, there are 21 new or higher taxes imposed by Obama’s health care law — and 21 more reasons to repeal it.
Take Your Medicine, America… Stephen Moore, Senior Economics Writer with the Wall Street Journal, told FOX and Friends this morning that nearly 75% of Obamacare costs will fall on the backs of those Americans making less than $120,000 a year.
It is true and the CBO confirmed it:
Jim Hoft comments on the following video where the White House Chief of Staff was trying to lie about the Supreme Court ruling, and then lied about it being some form of tax. So Fox News’ Chris Wallace played the audio from Obama’s Lawyer in the Supreme Court saying it is a tax. It is clear that the Obama Administration plan is to lie about ObamaCare and lie about the tax.
In the video below the White House calls those who pay the penalty tax “free riders”, because they will have to pay because of all of the new taxes ObamaCare puts on health insurance and care which will price health insurance out of the reach of the young and the working lower middle class. They are not the free riders, the young and working poor/middle class aren’t getting anything, they are the ones who are PAYING! The free riders are the few who will get their health insurance subsidized in part from that money paid. They are the free riders because they are getting at least a part of their insurance paid for by others who are forced to pay the penalty because they can’t afford health insurance any longer under ObamaCare mandates and taxes which are already causing rates to skyrocket.
Democrats told us Obamacare was not a tax.
Then they argued in front of the Supreme Court that it was a tax.
Now they want to tell us again that Obamacare is not a tax.
Jack Lew, the Obama White House Chief of Staff, was trying to persuade Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday that Obamacare was not a tax. But it didn’t work out so well for Lew when Wallace played audio of the Obama lawyer arguing that Obamacare was a tax in front of the Supreme Court.
While we were all debating the cost to our liberty due to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), we were ignoring the cost to our pockets. If there ever was a reason for bipartisan rage about this law, it should be on the twenty – yes, twenty – hidden new taxes of this law. Making matters even more relevant is that seven of these taxes are levied on all citizens regardless of income. Hence, Mr. Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 is just another falsehood associated with this legislation.
The first, and best known, of these seven taxes that will hit all Americans as a result of Obamacare is the Individual Mandate Tax (no longer concealed as a penalty). This provision will require a couple to pay the higher of a base tax of $1,360 per year, or 2.5% of adjusted growth income starting with lower base tax and rising to this level by 2016. Individuals will see a base tax of $695 and families a base tax of $2,085 per year by 2016.
[The following taxes affect those who have disabled family members disproportionately – Political Arena Editor]
Next up is the Medicine Cabinet Tax that took effect in 2011. This tax prohibits reimbursement of expenses for over-the-counter medicine, with the lone exception of insulin, from an employee’s pre-tax dollar funded Health Saving Account (HSA), Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Reimbursement Account (HRA). This provision hurts middle class earners particularly hard since they earn enough to actually pay federal taxes, but not enough to make this restriction negligible.
The Flexible Spending Account (FSA) Cap, which will begin in 2013, is perhaps the most hurtful provision to the middle class. This part of the law imposes a cap of $2,500 per year (which is now unlimited) on the amount of pre-tax dollars that could be deposited into these accounts. Why is this particularly hurtful to the middle class? It is because funds in these accounts may be used to pay for special needs education for special needs children in the United States. Tuition rates for this type of special education can easily exceed $14,000 per year and the use of pre-tax dollars has helped many middle income families.
Another direct hit to the middle class is the Medical Itemized Deduction Hurdle which is currently 7.5% of adjusted gross income. This is the hurdle that must be met before medical expenses over that hurdle can be taken as a deduction on federal income taxes. Obamacare raises this hurdle to 10% of adjusted gross income beginning in 2013. Consider the middle class family with $80,000 of adjusted gross income and $8,000 of medical expenses. Currently, that family can get some relief from being able to take a $2,000 deduction (7.5% X $80,000 = $6,000; $8,000 –$6,000 = $2,000). An increase to 10% would eliminate the deduction in this example and if that family was paying a 25% federal tax rate, the real cost of that lost deduction would be $500.
Continue reading about other new ObamaCare taxes HERE.
This is one of those MUST read posts that must be read from beginning to end to have the necessary impact. Read every last word. Normally we try to excerpt posts, but this information is SO important that as many people as possible must fully understand the information here.
Since NO ONE seems willing to discuss the REAL reason that health insurance premiums are increasing dramatically. Let me break down the 4 primary reasons. They are as follows:
1.) My Blue Cross Group clients are receiving policy renewal rate increases this year of up to 46% for THE FIRST TIME in 15 years. See just a few of them here. Their prior premium increases were NO WHERE NEAR this amount. This is not isolated to Blue Cross either. These premium increases are happening in many markets across the United States in both the Individual AND Group health insurance markets. I’m simply using Blue Cross as an example since the name is most widely recognized.
These increases are due in large part to the fact that MULTIPLE new “Preventative Care” mandates were imposed upon all “non-grandfathered” health insurance plans as of 9/23/2010 under the PPACA (Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act). A “Non-grandfathered” health insurance plan is a plan that was purchased after the PPACA (a.k.a “Obamacare”) was signed in to law on March 23, 2010. Keep in mind, these were ALL mandated to be covered no later than 1/1/2011 WITHOUT a co pay or a DEDUCTIBLE (a.k.a. “FREE”). The entire list is as follows:
Covered Preventive Services for Adults
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm one-time screening for men of specified ages who have ever smoked
Alcohol Misuse screening and counseling
Aspirin use for men and women of certain ages
Blood Pressure screening for all adults
Cholesterol screening for adults of certain ages or at higher risk
Colorectal Cancer screening for adults over 50
Depression screening for adults
Type 2 Diabetes screening for adults with high blood pressure
Diet counseling for adults at higher risk for chronic disease
HIV screening for all adults at higher risk
Immunizationvaccines for adults–doses, recommended ages, and recommended populations vary:
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Herpes Zoster
Human Papillomavirus
Influenza
Measles, Mumps, Rubella
Meningococcal
Pneumococcal
Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis
Varicella
Obesity screening and counseling for all adults
Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) prevention counseling for adults at higher risk
Tobacco Use screening for all adults and cessation interventions for tobacco users
Syphilis screening for all adults at higher risk
Covered Preventive Services for Women, Including Pregnant Women
Anemia screening on a routine basis for pregnant women
BRCA counseling about genetic testing for women at higher risk
Breast Cancer Mammography screenings every 1 to 2 years for women over 40
Breast Cancer Chemoprevention counseling for women at higher risk
Breast Feeding interventions to support and promote breast feeding
Cervical Cancer screening for sexually active women
Chlamydia Infection screening for younger women and other women at higher risk
Contraceptive Methods and Counseling including morning after abortion pill (added 8/1/11)
Folic Acid supplements for women who may become pregnant
Gonorrhea screening for all women at higher risk
Hepatitis B screening for pregnant women at their first prenatal visit
Osteoporosis screening for women over age 60 depending on risk factors
Rh Incompatibility screening for all pregnant women and follow-up testing for women at higher risk
Tobacco Use screening and interventions for all women, and expanded counseling for pregnant tobacco users
Syphilis screening for all pregnant women or other women at increased risk
Covered Preventive Services for Children
Alcohol and Drug Use assessments for adolescents
Autism screening for children at 18 and 24 months
Behavioral assessments for children of all ages
Cervical Dysplasia screening for sexually active females
Congenital Hypothyroidism screening for newborns
Developmental screening for children under age 3, and surveillance throughout childhood
Dyslipidemia screening for children at higher risk of lipid disorders
Fluoride Chemoprevention supplements for children without fluoride in their water source
Gonorrhea preventive medication for the eyes of all newborns
Hearing screening for all newborns
Height, Weight and Body Mass Index measurements for children
Hematocrit or Hemoglobin screening for children
Hemoglobinopathies or sickle cell screening for newborns
HIV screening for adolescents at higher risk
Immunizationvaccines for children from birth to age 18 —doses, recommended ages, and recommended populations vary:
Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis
Haemophilus influenzae type b
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Human Papillomavirus
Inactivated Poliovirus
Influenza
Measles, Mumps, Rubella
Meningococcal
Pneumococcal
Rotavirus
Varicella
Iron supplements for children ages 6 to 12 months at risk for anemia
Lead screening for children at risk of exposure
Medical History for all children throughout development
Obesity screening and counseling
Oral Health risk assessment for young children
Phenylketonuria (PKU) screening for this genetic disorder in newborns
Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) prevention counseling for adolescents at higher risk
Tuberculin testing for children at higher risk of tuberculosis
UPDATE: On August 1, 2011 the Obama Administration mandated even more Preventative Care benefits on to every major medical health insurance plan in the nation. These mandates will drive up health insurance premiums even higher. See the new mandates here.
3.) Now we come to reason number three. The ONEROUS new Medical Loss Ratios or “MLR’s”. This is why health insurance premiums are increasing on “Non-Grand-Fathered” health insurance plans as well. For full details on these I refer you to the following link from the Heritage Institute. Please READ the TRUTH there: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/01/Squeezing-out-Private-Health-Plans
4.) The rapid implementation of the new Medical Loss Ratios have led to more than 20 health insurance carriers closing their doors or refusing to sell health insurance again. This has left millions of American’s either uninsured or without the plan they had prior to the passage of the PPACA. This is exactly the opposite of what President Obama promised when he said in his speech to the AMA on June 15, 2009 “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” Find out the names of the carriers that have left the industry since the passage of the PPACA as well as all the other damage done to the health insurance industry since the passage of the PPACA by reading the new study completed by the Galen Institute on December 1, 2011 entitled “A Radical Restructuring of Health Insurance.”
Tell me WHO in their RIGHT MIND thinks forcing all the aforementioned NEW MANDATES on to every health insurance policy in the country would actually “bend the cost curve DOWN”? In fact, mandates are a major reason why health insurance premiums have been increasing exponentially over the last few decades. In 1979 there were 252 mandates in force in health care, by 2007 there were nearly 1900. With the implementation of the PPACA we have tipped the scales at nearly 2000 mandates. Keep piling them on and costs will continue to rise.
UPDATE III – October 18th 2012 – the number is 36 either filing for bankruptcy or about to – LINK
The latest “Solyndra” is Abound Solar. With so many of these green energy boondoggles it looks like this: Obama gives big taxpayer money to a campaign donor who is an owner in a junk “green energy company”. Said owners pay themselves in a big way, give big money to Democrats and go out of business. “Scheming that the right people got their loan guarantees” – LINK.
Abound Solar Inc., a U.S. solar manufacturer that was awarded a $400 million U.S. loan guarantee, will suspend operations and file for bankruptcy because its panels were too expensive to compete.
Abound borrowed about $70 million against the guarantee, the Loveland, Colorado-based company said today in a statement. It plans to file for bankruptcy protection in Wilmington, Delaware, next week.
The failure will follow that of Solyndra LLC, which shut down in August after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the same U.S. Energy Department program. Abound stopped production in February to focus on reducing costs after a global oversupply and increasing competition from China drove down the price of solar panels by half last year.
Ouch –
U.S. taxpayers may lose $40 million to $60 million on the loan after Abound’s assets are sold and the bankruptcy proceeding closes, Damien LaVera, an Energy Department spokesman, said in a statement today.
For more coverage of green energy boondoggles and corruption see our Alarmismcategory.
Aside from Finnish car company (and Stimulus money recipient) Fiskar already having troubles, here is the list:
UPDATE – Make that 16 – Amonix Corp near Las Vegas closes doors after 14 months and $20 million in Green Energy grants – LINK
Solyndra
Abound Solar
Energy Conversion Devices
BrightSource
LSP
Evergreen Solar
Ener1
SunPower
Beacon Power
ECOtality
Uni-Solar
Azure Dynamics
Solar Trust
A123 – Being handed to the Chinese after they got our money? – LINK.
UPDATE II – A123 now filing for bankruptcy and selling assets to Johnson Controls – LINK.
I have been a multi-state licensed health and life insurance Broker for more than 15 years now. I have also served as a Subject Matter Expert on Health Insurance for multiple business journals around our great country. One of the biggest challenges I’ve had to deal with throughout the years has been trying to secure coverage for people with pre-existing conditions who obtain their health insurance on the Individual market. They represent 10% of the American Insured.
I’ve never had to worry about pre-existing conditions with the other 90% of American Insured’s who get their health insurance through an Employer Sponsored Group Plan. Why? Because A Federal law called HIPAA has protected them against being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions for more than 14 years now.
Because Government legislators did NOT apply this law to Individual health insurance policies, you can be labeled as “uninsurable” when you apply for an individual health insurance policy if you have one or more pre-existing conditions. That being said, who should we TRULY blame for the fact that you can be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition? Is it the Insurance Company’s fault? Or are they simply following a law that was written by Government Law Makers who did not include HIPAA portability protection for the MILLIONS of American’s who purchase Health Insurance on their own in the Individual Market?
Read the details about what to do if you have pre-existing conditions, what is wrong with the current system, and how to fix it HERE.
Who are the Uninsured? Did you know almost half make over $50,000 a year? Did you know that a third of the uninsured qualify for low cost insurance programs and simply refuse to enroll?
It was government law that created the pre-existing condition problem for 10% of the population:
In the video above where the speaker talks about how Obama lied about a man who had a pre-existing condition Factcheck.org verified it HERE.
#1: The charge that the Roberts Court is a right-of-center court has been proven wrong in dramatic fashion.
It’s not just the ObamaCare decision that can be characterized as liberal. In this term alone, the Court invalidated most of the Arizona immigration law, declared mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles unconstitutional, invalidated FCC fines for fleeting expletives and brief nudity, and broadened protections for criminal defendants in cases involving both search and seizure and ineffective assistance of counsel.
#2: Five is not enough.
It’s no fluke that one or more of the five center-right Justices deeply disappointed conservatives three times in just the last few days. It’s clear that five center-right Justices on the Court will never be enough to substantially advance the law in a conservative direction. Unlike the Democratic appointees on the Court, who can be counted on to vote the progressive way when the stakes are high, Republican appointees – no matter how carefully selected – cannot be counted on to consistently uphold conservative principles.
#3: Though the immediate impact of the decision was a stunning defeat for conservatives, the larger cause of constitutional federalism was advanced.
As legal precedent, the ObamaCare decision strengthens the Constitution’s protection of state sovereignty and its limits on Congress’s power under the Commerce, Spending, and Necessary & Proper clauses. Quin Hillyer concludes that:
“[S]even of nine justices … finding that the Medicaid provision amounts to an unconstitutional coercion of the states … combined with the majority in favor of limiting the reach of the Commerce Clause, effectively means that the left lost far more than it won in terms of lasting legal precedent.”
Justice Ginsburg charged that “The Chief Justice’s crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause harks back to the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’ efforts to regulate the national economy.” Let’s hope so. In any case, now that it “will be hard … to criticize the John Roberts Supreme Court … as partisan” – in the words of liberal Supreme Court litigator and observer Tom Goldstein – it will also be hard to criticize the newly limited reading of the Commerce Clause as out of the mainstream.
#4: Obama and company’s attempt to cow the Supreme Court succeeded.
Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman writes that:
“Roberts knew the consequences of striking down the individual mandate: He would have been attacked by the president and the news media as the chief of the most activist conservative court since the 1930s.”
One way or another, the pressure apparently got to Roberts. Professor Lawrence Solum of Georgetown Law expresses the conclusion of many that language in the four-Justice dissent “is highly suggestive of a majority opinion. … This suggests that Justice Roberts switched his vote.”
This problem is nothing new. Moderately conservative appointees to the Court often drift to the left over time. I chalk it up to them caring too much about their reviews in the Washington Post.
#5: The bullet ObamaCare dodged was more deadly than imagined.
The conventional wisdom was that if the individual mandate were declared unconstitutional, only the mandate and two related provisions would be struck down, saving the rest of the statute. Instead, each of the four Justices who found the mandate unconstitutional voted to strike down the entire statute. But for Roberts’s surprise vote, that would have been the holding of the Court, exceeding the hopes of ObamaCare’s opponents.
#6: Roberts’s opinion was judicial activism at its worst.
Those who say the Chief Justice saved the Court from being branded a bunch of right wing activists are at least half wrong. Roberts’ logical contortions – going so far as to conclude that the individual mandate was simultaneously a tax and not a tax – invite charges of activism.
Even famed liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz concedes that, in order to achieve “a political compromise,” “Justice Roberts went out of his way to characterize the penalty for not buying insurance as a tax increase.” Such results-oriented judging, no matter its motive, is the hallmark of judicial activism.
I almost wish President Bush had appointed Barack Obama to the Supreme Court instead of Justice Roberts. That would have given us a majority of five Justices willing to emphatically say that the mandate is not a tax
#7: Chief Justice Roberts will likely be best remembered for disappointing conservatives in the most important case of his judicial career.
Whether fair or unfair, the sentiments of many conservatives are summed up by the editors of National Review: “If the law has been rendered less constitutionally obnoxious, the Court has rendered itself more so. Chief Justice Roberts cannot justly take pride in this legacy.” Michael Walsh compares the Chief Justice’s surprise vote to Justice Owen Roberts’ famous switch, under pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, that ushered in the era of virtually limitless federal power that continues to this day. There can be no more damning comparison.
On the flipside, Roberts may enjoy the accolades he is getting from more progressive circles. But rest assured– those will last only until the next big Supreme Court decision that offends liberal sensitivities.
#8: The White House should not be celebrating.
The 2012 election will now be a referendum on ObamaCare both at the federal level, where repeal of ObamaCare will be determined, and at the state level, where the future of the now-optional Medicaid extension will be determined. That’s not a good thing for President Obama, as indicated by his reticence about mentioning ObamaCare on the campaign trail. And that was before the individual mandate became a tax.
Michael Shear of the New York Times sums up the President’s problem:
“[T]he ruling also has the potential to re-energize the Tea Party movement .. and provide new political power to Mitt Romney’s pledge to repeal the law … Republicans eager to seize control of the Senate now have a renewed rallying cry in races across the country.”
#9: Don’t let the oral argument or talking heads fool you.
Early on, I and other attorneys were convinced that 1) Chief Justice Roberts, because of his minimalist tendencies, was as much a swing vote in the ObamaCare case as Justice Kennedy, 2) it would be very tempting for moderates on the Court to make the constitutional problem go away by calling the individual mandate a tax, and 3) the legal challenge to the Medicaid expansion was not being taken seriously enough because of the focus on the mandate. By the time I finished listening to the oral arguments in the Supreme Court and the talking heads on television, I had abandoned all three convictions. I should have trusted my instincts.
#10: The meaning of the ObamaCare decision is yet to be determined.
The malleability of Supreme Court decisions is demonstrated by another landmark decision 34 years ago. Allan Bakke sued the University of California over its use of minority preferences in admissions and won 5-4. A single Justice, Lewis Powell, opined that a school’s interest in achieving intellectual diversity could justify using race as one of many diversity factors. Supporters of affirmative action successfully spun the decision to mean that a majority of the Court supported the diversity rationale and that the rationale could justify huge racial preferences aimed at only skin-deep diversity.
Will the ObamaCare decision come to stand for the renewal of federalism principles or for upholding the biggest federal overreach in history? That will be determined by the litigation and communications skills of federalism’s supporters and critics.
Curt Levey is a constitutional law attorney and President of the Committee for Justice in Washington, DC.
Team Romney pulled in $4.6 million in a 24-hour period with an average donation of under $100; 33% of donations were under $25. Over 200 thousand unique visitors hit the Romney campaign site, with one in four making a donation.
With the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare, everyone is wondering what’s next for big government? Here are some ideas for federal policymakers to consider:
Federal Broccoli Act of 2013: Eat your broccoli, else pay the IRS $1,000.
Federal Recycling Act of 2014: Fill your blue box and put on the curb, else pay the IRS $2,000.
Federal Green Car Act of 2015: Make your next car battery powered, else pay the IRS $3,000.
Federal Domestic Jobs Act of 2016: Don’t exceed 25 percent foreign content on family consumer purchases, else pay the IRS $4,000.
Federal Obesity Act of 2017: Achieve listed BMI on your mandated annual physical, else pay the IRS $5,000.
Federal National Service Act of 2018: Serve two years in the military or the local soup kitchen, else pay the IRS $6,000.
Federal Housing Efficiency Act of 2019: Don’t exceed 1,000 square feet of living space per person in your household, else pay the IRS $7,000.
Federal Population Growth Act of 2020: Don’t exceed two children per couple, else pay the IRS $8,000.
Lawmakers are working to block an unprecedented power grab by the Environmental Protection Agency to use the Clean Water Act (CWA) and control land alongside ditches, gullies and other ephemeral spots by claiming the sources are part of navigable waterways.
These temporary water sources are often created by rain or snowmelt, and would make it harder for private property owners to build in their own backyards, grow crops, raise livestock and conduct other activities on their own land, lawmakers say.
“Never in the history of the CWA has federal regulation defined ditches and other upland features as ‘waters of the United States,’” said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the ranking committee member, and Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio), chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.
“This is without a doubt an expansion of federal jurisdiction,” the lawmakers said in a May 31 letter to House colleagues.
The unusual alliance of the powerful House Republicans and Democrat to jointly sponsor legislation to overturn the new guidelines signals a willingness on Capitol Hill to rein in the formidable agency.
“The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to increase costs and regulatory burdens for American businesses, farmers and individual property owners,” Mica said in a statement to Human Events. “This federal jurisdiction grab has been opposed by Congress for years, and now the administration and its agencies are ignoring law and rulemaking procedures in order to tighten their regulatory grip over every water body in the country.”
“But this administration needs to realize it is not above the law,” Mica said.
The House measure carries 64 Republican and Democratic cosponsors and was passed in committee last week. A companion piece of legislation is already gathering steam in the Senate and is cosponsored by 26 Republicans.
“President Obama’s EPA continues to act as if it is above the law. It is using this overreaching guidance to pre-empt state and local governments, farmers and ranchers, small business owners and homeowners from making local land and water use decisions,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in announcing their measure in March. “Our bill will stop this unprecedented Washington power grab and restore Americans’ property rights.”
“It’s time to get EPA lawyers out of Americans’ backyards,” Barrasso said.
President Obama’s Food and Drug Administration has caused “a public health crisis” — a prescription drug shortage over the past two years — by increasing the number of threats issued to raid and close drug manufacturing plants, according to House investigators.
“This shortage appears to be a direct result of over-aggressive and excessive regulatory action,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement. “These drugs can save lives and keep people who need them living healthy lives. The FDA is failing to ensure the availability of quality products.”
President Obama signed an executive order last year to help the FDA anticipate drug shortages while knocking Congress for failing to pass his preferred legislation on the issue. “Congress has been trying since February to do something about this,” Obama said in November. “It has not yet been able to get it done . . . we can’t wait.”
The committee report concluded that a significant portion of the drug shortage is a problem of the Obama administration’s making. “Among shuttered manufacturing lines that occurred over the previous two years, the committee’s review did not find any instances where the shutdown was associated with reports of drugs harming customers,” the report says, noting a 30 percent drop in the manufacture of certain prescription drugs at the largest manufacturers in the country.
Instead, the drug shortage crisis began in 2010 after the FDA began sending letters to companies found to be in violation of a given rule, in which the company was warned that “failure to promptly correct these violations may result in legal action without further notice including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.”
The FDA sent just 474 such letters in 2009, but that number spiked to 1720 in 2011. “A common sense approach to regulations must be restored at the FDA,” the committee report advised, calling for more targeted measures to induce company compliance with regulations. “Agency protocols should be revised so that the agency is required to consider the implications of its actions on the nation’s supply of critical drugs.”
In an effort to punish Arizona for winning the core of the battle in the Supreme Court against the Obama Administration the administration is now going to punish Arizona, Chicago style.
The Obama administration said Monday it is suspending existing agreements with Arizona police over enforcement of federal immigration laws, and said it has issued a directive telling federal authorities to decline many of the calls reporting illegal immigrants that the Homeland Security Department may get from Arizona police.
Administration officials, speaking on condition they not be named, told reporters they expect to see an increase in the number of calls they get from Arizona police — but that won’t change President Obama’s decision to limit whom the government actually tries to detain and deport.
“We will not be issuing detainers on individuals unless they clearly meet our defined priorities,” one official said in a telephone briefing.
The official said that despite the increased number of calls, which presumably means more illegal immigrants being reported, the Homeland Security Department is unlikely to detain a significantly higher number of people and won’t be boosting personnel to handle the new calls.
#6. “When Mitt Romney was governor, Massachusetts was No. 1 in state debt. $18 billion in debt. More debt per person than any other state in the country.” — from an attack ad titled “Number One” that was posted June 12, 2012 on the Obama campaign’s official YouTube page
While this statement is factually accurate, it leaves out a big part of the picture.
Massachusetts owed a notoriously large state debt for a long time, certainly before Romney ever set foot in the governor’s office. Part of the reason the Bay State’s debt is so high, as PolitiFact points out, is because many projects that in other states would be funded by counties are funded by the state in Massachusetts.
Secondly, as anyone who’s ever lived in Massachusetts will tell you, “the Big Dig” — a highway and tunnel construction project that was started in the 1980s and has cost over $20 billion — has been a budgetary nightmare for decades. The Boston Globe estimates the project won’t be paid off until 2038 at the earliest. No matter who’s governor of Massachusetts, the Big Dig is still an incredibly expensive project, with the interest alone costing the state billions….
#3. “[Under Romney] Massachusetts plunged to 47th in job creation.” — David Axelrod, Obama campaign senior advisor, on CBS’s ‘Face The Nation,’ June 3, 2012
Romney’s been pummeled with this statistic, first during the Republican primaries and now by the Obama campaign (see here, here and here). Factually, it’s accurate to say that Massachusetts was 47th out of 50 states for job growth from December 2002 through December 2006 — PolitiFact verified the statement using Bureau of Labor Statistics. But there are different ways of looking at the numbers, and, as noted above, Romney inherited a state that was already in deep economic trouble.
While the rate of job growth in Massachusetts was lower than the rate for the country as a whole during that time, the number of jobs in the state did increase under Romney’s tenure.
#2. “Our businesses have created almost 4.3 million new jobs over the last 27 months.” — Obama during a presidential address in Golden Valley, Minn. (June 2, 2012)
Obama has made this claim many times recently (see here, here and here, and see Sarah Jessica Parker say it here), but again, he isn’t giving the whole picture. We called Josh Bivens, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, to see what the missing context was. Bivens told us that Obama neglected to mention the 500,000 jobs that were lost in the public sector over the same time period.
Today Justice Roberts engaged in one of the most politically motivated acts of judicial activism in the history of the court.
The Commerce Clause, whose “interpretation” expanded in 1942 as a result of a political threat from FDR to pass a judicial act to add a dozen or so members to the court and appoint them with political cronies if the court didn’t start ruling in his favor, finally had a line drawn in the sand with this ruling. Every lawyer knows that the expanding Commerce Clause interpretation lacked a certain legitimacy because of this history and even some more liberal inclined legal scholars have been coming to terms with this reality. Government expansionists have wiped their feet on that interpretation and as is so often the case, they were given an inch and took a mile.
Today, Justice Roberts along with four other Justices (Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) properly ruled that using the Commerce Clause to compel entrance into a market goes too far and that the Commerce Clause does not allow the government to compel market activity. This is good but is rendered almost hollow by what Roberts did as I will explain below.
Keep on mind that Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer and Sotomoyor would have a Commerce Clause unlimited in power meaning that government can compel you to do most anything from the womb to the tomb. Anyone who tells you that the left does not want a leviathan state ….
So Roberts, in a nakedly political move to save ObamaCare, decided to rewrite the law and convert the mandate penalty into a tax. [/SARCASM ON] You see, Congress is stupid and in spite of the fact that they write and modify tax law every year, obviously somehow with this law, Congress had somehow forgotten to write it as a tax, or even call it a tax, but lucky for us we have Justice Roberts to come along and rewrite the law to teach those silly dopes in Congress how to write tax law [/SARCASM OFF]. Of course it is a responsibility of the court to ascertain and apply the legislative intent of the law as best the court can, GREAT! Except that the problem is that the President and members of Congress said repeatedly that the mandate penalty is NOT a tax.
When the Court asked for briefs on the ObamaCare law (ACA) they asked for briefs on the mandate, the denial of all Medicaid funds if states didn’t comply, the Commerce Clause etc. The Court did NOT ask for brief’s on the tax law implications of ObamaCare. This shows that web sites that watch the Supreme Court such as Prof. Volohk are very likely correct in their assertion that Roberts’ interpretation came very late in the process and in fact he probably changed his vote at near the last moment.
Tax law has to come in certain forms, either as a direct tax (called a capitation tax), an excise tax, or an income tax. The Constitution, in Article I Section 2, puts limits on the types of taxes that can be levied and there is plenty of case law defining these issues, all of which was ignored by Justice Roberts (by Amendment the income tax is an exception to Article I Section 2). In the opinion Roberts could not even tell us what kind of tax the ObamaCare mandate is. Is it a direct tax which must be apportioned equally, but look who is exempt; or is it an excise tax? In some ways the Roberts decision seems to act like it is parts of both.
[Editor’s Note: Some readers do not understand the tax law problem I was referring to so I will elaborate. Is the mandate an income tax? No. Is the mandate an excise tax? Well an excise tax is a fee for service so the answer is no. Is it a direct tax (capitation tax) no, because it is not equally apportioned among the states and the people (just look at who gets exempt for starters, states that get waivers ets etc). In short, as a tax it is not a constitutional one and goes against all previous tax precedent.]
There is also the issue of the Anti-injuction Act. The Anti-injuction Act says that the Court may not rule on a tax, no plaintiff has standing in court, until they are actually hit with paying the tax, thus preventing the Court from ruling on the matter further. Roberts, somehow in his ruling out of thin air, rules that it is not a tax for the purpose of the Anti-injuction Act, but is a tax when it comes to the health insurance mandate and penalty, even though Congress specifically said it was not a tax. So for part of the ruling it is a tax and for the other part is is not a tax. This is insanity. Again, the fact that Roberts and the Court did not ask for briefs on this subject indicates that this scheme to save ObamaCare was invented at the last minute out of thin air.
Roberts’ ruling uses twisted logic to get from Point A to Point B. This is a ruling with a goal in mind and an attempt to justify it after the decision was made. Charles Krauthammer wrote that what Roberts pulled out of his hat is a dodge.
The Chief Justice (Roberts) was hell-bent to find a way to make this law applicable, so he just decided, you know what, as a tax increase it works… – Rush Limbaugh.
According to Roberts, the government is not punishing you and mandating you to enter the market, thus penalizing inactivity, instead they are merely taxing inactivity and somehow that makes it OK. This amounts to a distinction without a difference. Why? Now the penalty is low, but when the penalty for those who do not buy the government mandated insurance goes up to thousands of dollars a year in (2018) and the costs of health insurance are already skyrocketing because of ObamaCare, what are low income people going to do? Go to jail for not paying their (as now defined by Roberts) ObamaCare taxes? In every way that matters in the application of the ObamaCare law per the Roberts ruling it is a mandate with a penalty and the IRS will not be forgiving. The IRS has no enforcement mechanism for ObamaCare now, but does anyone expect that to last? Roberts actually has the gall to make the case that since the penalty is low it is not a “real” mandate.
The Secretary of Health and Human services can essentially regulate health care to the point of virtually nationalizing it over time. In practice the government’s power to reach into our lives is greatly expanded in spite of the feckless words in the ruling that limit the Commerce Clause. It is Roberts’ job to uphold the basic tenant of limited government. The power grab in ObamaCare is off the charts which is why even the liberal minded Justice Kennedy made it clear that such a grab is unconstitutional in its entirety.
The Roberts’ ruling is lawless. If his goal was to galvanize traditional America for Romney, he did it.
See what I mean –
UPDATE: After the Supreme Court Ruling on Obamacare What is Next? – LINK
[Editor’s Note – I can see the objections now: Chuck, sure you have legal training, but you are not a lawyer and some of the people you have quoted are not lawyers (such as Limbaugh and Krauthammer). In coming weeks there will be law review and professorial articles critiquing this ruling in detail. Time will tell if I am correct in my analysis, but my record of accuracy in such articles leaves me confident.]
UPDATE II – Dissents Back Political Arena Editor’s Analysis
Editor’s Note – I deliberately did not read far into the dissent because I wanted to form my own view of the ruling and also because I was so steamed after reading Roberts’ incoherent pretzel logic that I had to walk away. The Weekly Standard has a nice summary of the ruling with some notes in plain English to make it easier to understand. Of course the entire ruling and dissents can be seen at the pdf link at the top of the page.
Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito Dissent: ‘We Cannot Rewrite the Statute to Be What It Is Not’
“Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling.”
Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito forcefully disagree with Roberts in their dissent. “[W]e cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not,” the four Justices write. “[W]e have never—never—treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’ Eighteen times in §5000A itself and elsewhere throughout the Act, Congress called the exaction in §5000A(b) a ‘penalty.'”
The dissenting Justices also argue that “judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling,” since the Constitution requires tax bills to originate in the House of Representatives, “the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off.”
The dissent goes to to destroy in details the pretzel logic and lack of legal reasoning and precedent of the Roberts ruling. Continue reading HERE.
“The Roberts ruling is so incoherent and full of internal contradictions that I would be embarrassed to put my name on it.”
UPDATE IV – First Paragraph of the dissent:
The first paragraph in the dissent hits it out of the park –
The case is easy and straightforward, however, in another respect. What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States.
[Street Translation via the Editor – There are generally accepted limits on government power that have been repeated in the Founding Documents and in 220 years of law that tell us countless times that government power is limited. The fact that ObamaCare goes in excess of those limits is a no brainer. – Amen]
UPDATE V– Curt Levey: Top 10 Lessons from the Roberts ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE VI – Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly on the Supreme Court: There is no silver lining (video) – LINK
UPDATE VII – Explanation of the ObamaCare Ruling for the Non-lawyer – LINK
UPDATE VIII – Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legal – LINK
UPDATE IX– Prof. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax – LINK
Critical UPDATE – ObamaCare Panel Targeting Women’s Health Screenings…Again – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Megyn Kelly calls out Obama: Your lawyer called it a tax in court and now your campaign people are lying about it (video) – LINK
Critical UPDATE – ObamaCare promises access to “coverage” for those with existing conditions, but over time limits health care access… – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Are Your Dollars Going to Doctors or Paper Pushers? – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Dr. Jill Vecchio: ObamaCare forces doctors to violate the Hippocratic Oath (video) – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Do You Qualify for the New ObamaCare Tax/Penalty? – LINK
Critical UPDATE – CBO: ObamaCare Will Leave 30 Million Uninsured – LINK
Only in America does “health care reform” start with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents, who will decide whether or not your insurance policy merits a fine – Barry L. Camp
UPDATE – Political Arena Analysis: Why Roberts is full of it – LINK
UPDATE II – After the Supreme Court Ruling on ObamaCare What is Next? – LINK
UPDATE III– Internet On Fire Over Roberts’ ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE IV – Curt Levey: Top 10 Lessons from the Roberts ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE V – Libs on Twitter call Justice Thomas “N-Word” After Ruling; Call Sarah Palin Slut and Attack Her Kids – LINK
UPDATE VI– The Truth About Pre-Existing Conditions Will Surprise You – LINK
UPDATE VII – Why Are Health Insurance Premiums Increasing Faster After ObamaCare Passed? – LINK
UPDATE VIII – At least 7 new ObamaCare taxes directly impact the poor, middle class, and the disabled – LINK
UPDATE IX – WSJ Chief Economist: 75% of all ObamaCare taxes impact those who make less than $120,000 a year (video) – LINK
UPDATE X – IBD: 21 ObamaCare Taxes Already Causing Job Losses – LINK
UPDATE XI– British Socialized Health Service Kills Off 130,000 Elderly Every Year – LINK
UPDATE XII – “The Lemon” – Why Canada Is Now Reforming Their Socialized Health Care System (video) – LINK
UPDATE XIII – Forbes: ObamaCare Responsible for Health Insurance Premium Increases that Tripled in 2011 – LINK
UPDATE XIV – Obama Denies Waiver for Innovative Cost Saving Indiana Medicaid Program – LINK
UPDATE XV – Flashback 2008: Obama Trashed Hillary for Proposing Health Care “Penalty” (video) – LINK
UPDATE XVI – Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly on the Supreme Court: There is no silver lining (video) – LINK
UPDATE XVII – Five major ObamaCare taxes that will impact you in 2013 – LINK
UPDATE XVIII – Explanation of the ObamaCare Ruling for the Non-lawyer – LINK
UPDATE XIX – Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legal – LINK
UPDATE XX – Prof. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax – LINK
UPDATE XXI – Allen West on new outrageous federal regulations and the Roberts’ ruling (video) – LINK
UPDATE XXII – MUST SEE: ObamaCare’s Impact on YOU (video) & Even Russia Today Shreds the Roberts Ruling – LINK
UPDATE XXIII – ObamaCare creates 13,000 pages of new regulations and they aren’t done yet… – LINK
UPDATE XXIV – 83% of American physicians have considered leaving the profession over ObamaCare – LINK
UPDATE XXV – 46,159 had to flee Canada to get health care in 2011 – LINK
UPDATE XXVI – Broken Promises in ObamaCare. More New Taxes. – LINK
UPDATE XXVII – Survey: Nearly one in 10 employers to drop health coverage… – LINK– LINK
UPDATE XXVIII – CBO: Employers to be hit with $4 billion more in ObamaCare taxes than expected – LINK
UPDATE XXIX – Must See: ObamaCare and Health Insurance Expert C. Steven Tucker in Extended Interview (video) – LINK
UPDATE XXX – Dr. Jill Vecchio Explains ObamaCare in Detail (video) – LINK
Justice Roberts joined the leftists in the court saying that the ObamaCare mandate is just a tax and is constitutional on those grounds. This of course is silly on its face because those who wrote the taxing and commerce clauses are the same ones who rebelled against the Stamp Act and a 2% tea tax. Literally, according to five Justices the government can force you to buy anything or pay a fine in the form of a tax. The ruling takes the entire idea of “limited government” and tosses it out the window. Aside from repealing the ACA after the election, it is time for a Constitutional Amendment limiting the taxing power and defines the limits of the Commerce Clause.
Dissenting – Scalia, Thomas, KENNEDY, Alito – This Act “exceeds federal power”
Obama now has to run on passing the largest tax increase in history after promising not to raise taxes on those who make under $200,000. This election just became about ObamaCare.
A tax for THEE and not for ME – Democrats will now have to explain how they can pass a tax and a mandate on you but it doesn’t apply to members of Congress or their staff.
Democratic National Committee tweets:
IT’S CONSTITUTIONAL BITCHES!
DNC DELETED TWEET: ‘TAKE THAT MOTHER******S!’
Sen. McConnell:
The Supreme Court has spoken: this law is a tax. The bill sold to the American people was a deception.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp:
When they look back on the American system of once-limited government, June 28, 2012 will stand as a definitive date in the advance of government tyranny. Today, a slim majority of the Supreme Court turned our Constitution on its head, and ruled that the federal government, in effect, can force upon the American people anything it damn well pleases – as long as it is called a tax. Unlimited federal power, combined with judicial activism, has crafted a new regime that has destroyed our Founders’ vision.
Not only are individual liberties destroyed as a result of ObamaCare, but taxpayers are on the hook for a non-workable, ineffective, and outrageously expensive health care program. ObamaCare will drive America into bankruptcy, as the law is already radically exceeding original cost estimates. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that millions of Americans will likely lose their health insurance plan as employers are driven out of business or are unable to meet massive new mandates and costs of Washington.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli:
This decision goes against the very principle that America has a federal government of limited powers; a principle that the Founding Fathers clearly wrote into the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Constitution was meant to restrict the power of government precisely for the purpose of protecting your liberty and mine from the overreaching hand of the federal government. This unprecedented decision says that Congress has the authority to force citizens to buy private goods or face fines – a power it has never had in American history, and a power King George III and Parliament didn’t have over us when we were mere subjects of Great Britain. Since the federal government itself could never articulate to the court a constitutional limit to this power, Congress has gained an unlimited power to force citizens to buy anything.
Senator Rand Paul:
Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional. While the court may have erroneously come to the conclusion that the law is allowable, it certainly does nothing to make this mandate or government takeover of our health care right. ObamaCare is wrong for Americans. It will destroy our health care system. This now means we fight every hour, every day until November to elect a new President and a new Senate to repeal ObamaCare.
Sen. Marco Rubio:
If you don’t buy government approved insurance the IRS will be on your back.
Ann Coulter:
I was right about Roberts. Thank God we at least got Alito on the Court, instead of Bush’s secretary. Only the very rich will survive this decision. Healthcare the new Gulfstream jet. Opin: We will call mandate a “penalty” to survive anti-injunction act, but a “tax” for the power to tax.
Carrie Ann Towne:
Only an idiot thinks this somehow helps the poor. The government is essentially saying that if poor people cannot afford to buy insurance, which is outrageously expensive in part due to state and federal taxation of hospital beds, etc., and regulation, then they must pay a penalty for being too poor to pay for a service the cost of which the government has artificially inflated.
Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton:
They can tax you on the CO2 that you exhale. They can make me buy cranberries. I hate cranberries.
Roberts says it is not a mandate it is just a small tax if you don’t comply…”. How nice, and yes it isn’t 100% bad, but since the power to tax is the power to destroy, it is a mandate because the amount of the tax can be changed at the stroke of a pen. Also the Sec HHS is given wide power way beyond the (limited) commerce clause to rewrite regulations at her pleasure…. and that is way more than just taxing. The dissenters are correct and obviously so IMO.
Since FDR’s court packing threat the Commerce Clause interpretation has gone off the deep end. Everyone who has studied law seriously knows that the “modern” expansionist view of the commerce clause started to become interpreted that way not because the court had a legal epiphany, but rather they feared the Democratic Party would pack the court with 18 or so new justices all of whom would be political hacks. These new interpretations that were done under duress took the entire notion of limited government and tossed it out the window. I am glad to see Justice Scalia come to this point of view.
With a Supreme Court decision on the fate of President Obama’s health care law expected in the next two weeks, every wisp of a hint about the justices’ thinking is getting the scrutiny usually reserved for CAT scans.
Justice Antonin Scalia picked the right moment, then, to deliver more than 500 pages of hints, in a book to be published next week. He wrote it with Bryan A. Garner, and it is an overview and summation of the justice’s approach to making sense of statutes and the Constitution.
It is also studded with telling asides and intimations about past and future decisions.
Justice Scalia writes, for instance, that he has little use for a central precedent the Obama administration has cited to justify the health care law under the Constitution’s commerce clause, Wickard v. Filburn.
In that 1942 decision, Justice Scalia writes, the Supreme Court “expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason” by ruling that “a farmer’s cultivation of wheat for his own consumption affected interstate commerce and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.”
That position is good evidence, particularly when coupled with Justice Scalia’s skeptical questioning at the arguments in the health care case in March, that the administration will not capture his vote.
Justice Scalia’s treatment of the Wickard case had been far more respectful in his judicial writings. In the book’s preface, he explains (referring to himself in the third person) that he “knows that there are some, and fears that there may be many, opinions that he has joined or written over the past 30 years that contradict what is written here.” Some inconsistencies can be explained by respect for precedent, he writes, others “because wisdom has come late.”
“Worse still,” he writes, he “does not swear that the opinions that he joins or writes in the future will comply with what is written here,” for the first two reasons “or because a judge must remain open to persuasion by counsel.”
Mr. Garner, a prominent lexicographer and authority on usage, also collaborated with Justice Scalia on an earlier book, “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.” He said the timing of the new one was happenstance.
When I was in college finishing my latest degree I wrote a series of articles on the mortgage crisis (mid 2008). This is a good summary of this section of the scandal and what led to the collapse. This is by no means the whole story but as I said, a good summary of this layer of what gave us this mess.
The Obama Record: The Obama camp’s running a new ad reminding African-Americans of all he’s done for them as they weather an economic crisis he “inherited.” Left out is his own role in their predicament.
The press has never questioned the president about his involvement. But his fingerprints are there.
Before the crisis, Obama pushed thousands of credit-poor blacks into homes they couldn’t afford. As a civil-rights attorney, he sued banks to rubberstamp mortgages for urban residents.
Many are now in foreclosure. In fact, the lead client in one of his class-action suits has since lost her home and filed bankruptcy.
First some background: Obama focused on “housing rights” when he worked as a lawyer-activist and community organizer in South Side Chicago. His mentor — the man who placed him in his first job there — was the father of the anti-redlining movement: John McKnight. He coined the term “redlining” to describe the mapping off of minority neighborhoods from home loans.
McKnight wrote a letter for Obama that helped him get into Harvard. After he graduated, he worked for a Chicago civil-rights law firm that worked closely with McKnight’s radical Gamaliel Foundation and National People’s Action, as well as Acorn, to solicit lending-discrimination cases.
At the time, NPA and Acorn were lobbying the Clinton administration to tighten enforcement of anti-redlining laws.
They also dispatched bus loads of goons trained by Obama to the doorsteps of bankers to demand more home loans for minorities. Acorn even crashed the lobby of Citibank’s headquarters in New York and accused it of discriminating against blacks.
The pressure worked. In 1994, Clinton’s top bank regulators signed a landmark anti-redlining policy that declared traditional mortgage underwriting standards racist and mandated banks apply easier lending rules for minorities.
Also that year, Attorney General Janet Reno and her aide Eric Holder filed a mortgage discrimination case against a Washington-area bank that forced it to target minority neighborhoods for subprime loans.
Reno and Holder also encouraged civil-rights lawyers like Obama to file local lending-bias cases against banks.
The next year, Obama led a class-action suit against Citibank on behalf of several Chicago minorities who claimed they were rejected for home loans because of the color of their skin. It was one of 11 such suits filed against the financial giant in Chicago and New York in the 1990s.
As first reported in Paul Sperry’s “The Great American Bank Robbery,” the plaintiffs’ claim lacked merit. Factors other than race figured in the bank’s decision to turn them down for loans.
One of Obama’s clients had “inadequate collateral” and “an incomplete application,” while another had “delinquent credit obligations and other adverse credit history.”
Obama argued such facts miss the point: that Citibank’s neutral underwriting criteria may have adversely impacted his clients as a class of people. He demanded it turn over loan files from the entire Chicago metro area to prove it regularly engaged in a pattern of discrimination.
The court didn’t award him the files. But Citibank eventually settled, despite the weak case. Under the 1998 settlement, Citibank vowed to pay the alleged victims $1.4 million and launch a program to boost home lending to poor blacks in the metro area.
In the run-up to the crisis, Citibank underwrote thousands of shaky subprime mortgages to satisfy the court in Obama’s case. Defaults were common. When home prices collapsed, most of the loans went bust.
His lead African-American client, Selma Buycks-Roberson, who was denied a loan due to bad credit and low income, got her mortgage only to default on it years later.
She got a foreclosure notice in 2008, according to The Daily Caller website, along with many of her Chicago neighbors.
By putting them on the hook for loans they couldn’t pay, Obama did them no favors. Blacks have been hit hardest by foreclosures. But what does Obama care? The Caller reports he pocketed at least $23,000 from the Citibank case.
Today, he blames the devastating wealth drain in black communities on subprime mortgages. He says “greedy,” “predatory” lenders tricked poor minorities into paying higher fees and interest rates.
But Obama was for subprime loans before he was against them. “Subprime loans started off as a good idea,” he said as those loans began to sour in 2007.
His closest economic advisers also promoted subprime lending. Several months earlier, Chicago pal Austan Goolsbee, who later became his top economist, sang the praises of subprime loans in a New York Times column. He argued they allowed poor blacks “access to mortgages.”
One of Obama’s top bank regulators, Gary Gensler, once bragged that thanks to subprime mortgages, banks made home loans to minorities at “twice the rate” they made to other borrowers, according to “Bank Robbery.” “A subprime loan is a good option when the alternative is no access to credit,” he said years before the crisis.
Obama hasn’t learned from his mistakes.
Far from it, IBD has learned the mammoth credit watchdog agency he created (with input from NPA radicals) will dust off Clinton’s 1994 minority lending guidelines to crack down on stingy lenders. And he’s ordered Holder, now acting as his attorney general, to prosecute banks that don’t open branches in blighted urban areas.
Not only has Obama scapegoated banks for the crisis he helped cause, he’s exploited minority suffering to continue reckless policies that hurt those he claims to champion.
The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.
The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992.
The data represent one of the most detailed looks at how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Home-ownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.
The findings underscore the depth of the wounds of the financial crisis and how far many families remain from healing. If the recession set Americans back 20 years, economists say, the road forward is sure to be a long one. And so far, the country has seen only a halting recovery.
“It’s hard to overstate how serious the collapse in the economy was,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “We were in free fall.”
The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class. Only roughly half of middle-class Americans remained on the same economic rung during the downturn, the Fed found. Their median net worth — the value of assets such as homes, automobiles and stocks minus any debt — suffered the biggest drops.
Florida had lots of illegals and dead people on it’s voter rolls so the state did an audit to remove the ineligible listings. Of course Obama’s Department of Social Justice ran by Eric Holder, who also isn’t enforcing federal vote fraud laws, tried to stop Florida from trying to maintain accurate voter records.
The latest nonsense from the Democrat leadership is that the Fast & Furious investigation is just retaliation for this, but the Fast & Furious investigation started a year before the vote cleanup effort.
Today a federal judge rejected a Department of Justice request to issue a temporary restraining order blocking Florida from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls and rejected DOJ’s argument that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits removal of non-citizens from the voter rolls. The court also said that permitting known non-citizens to vote would result in “irreparable harm” to eligible voters.
Florida Governor Rick Scott was pleased with the decision, which is consistent with his position that Florida has an obligation to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.
“The court made a common-sense decision consistent with what I’ve been saying all along: that irreparable harm will result if non-citizens are allowed to vote. Today’s ruling puts the burden on the federal government to provide Florida with access to the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database. We know from just a small sample that an alarming number of non-citizens are on the voter rolls and many of them have illegally voted in past elections. The federal government has the power to prevent such irreparable harm from continuing, and Florida once again implores them to grant access to the SAVE database.”
Nearly a year ago, the state requested access to a citizenship database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, that would allow Florida to more accurately identify non-citizens who are registered to vote. To date, the federal government continues to block access, thereby preventing Florida’s efforts to ensure fair elections.
Forget executive privilege, contempt of Congress, “fast and furious,” how many documents the government has produced and who said what to whom on which date.
The Obama administration has almost certainly engaged in the most shockingly vile corruption scandal in the history of the country, not counting the results of Season Eight on “American Idol.”
Administration officials intentionally put guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, so that when the guns taken from Mexican crime scenes turned out to be American guns, Democrats would have a reason to crack down on gun sellers in the United States.
Democrats will never stop trying to take our guns away. They see something more lethal than a salad shooter and wet themselves.
But since their party was thrown out of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century as a result of passing the 1994 “assault weapons ban,” even liberals know they were going to need a really good argument to pass any limitation on guns ever again.
So it’s curious that Democrats all started telling the same lie about guns as soon as Obama became president. In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced to reporters on a trip to Mexico: “Since we know that the vast majority, 90 percent of that weaponry (used by Mexican drug cartels), comes from our country, we are going to try to stop it from getting there in the first place.”
As she sentimentally elaborated on Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren show: “The guns sold in the United States, which are illegal in Mexico, get smuggled and shipped across our border and arm these terrible drug-dealing criminals so that they can outgun these poor police officers along the border and elsewhere in Mexico.”
Suddenly that 90 percent statistic was everywhere. It was like the statistic on women beaten by their husbands on Super Bowl Sunday.
CBS’ Bob Schieffer asked Obama on “Face the Nation”: “It’s my understanding that 90 percent of the guns that they’re getting down in Mexico are coming from the United States. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job of cutting off the gun flow. Do you need any kind of legislative help on that front? Have you, for example, thought about asking Congress to reinstate the ban on assault weapons?”
At a Senate hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said: “It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors … come from the United States.”
And then, thanks to Fox News — the first network to report it — we found out the 90 percent figure was complete bunkum. It was a fabrication told by William Hoover, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), and then spread like wildfire by Democrats and the media.
Mexican law enforcement authorities send only a fraction of the guns they recover from criminals back to the U.S. for tracing. Which guns do they send? The guns that have U.S. serial numbers on them. It would be like asking a library to produce all their Mark Twain books and then concluding that 90 percent of the books in that library are by Mark Twain.
You begin to see why the left hates Fox News so much.
Obama backed away from the preposterous 90 percent claim. His National Security Council spokesman explained to Fox News that by “recovered,” they meant “guns traceable to the United States.” So, in other words, Democrats were frantically citing the amazing fact that almost all the guns traceable to the U.S. were … traceable to the U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters that even if the percentage is inaccurate, the “vast majority” of guns seized in crimes in Mexico come from the United States. (And he should know, because it turns out he was sending them there!)
This was absurd. Most of the guns used by drug cartels are automatic weapons — not to mention shoulder-fired rockets — that can’t be sold to most Americans. They are acquired from places like Russia, China and Guatemala.
Right about the time the 90 percent lie was unraveling, the Obama administration decided to directly hand thousands of American guns over to Mexican criminals. Apart from the fact that tracking thousands of guns into Mexico is not feasible or rational, the dumped guns didn’t have GPS tracing devices on them, anyway. There is no conceivable law enforcement objective to such a program.
This is what we know:
(1) Liberals thought it would be a great argument for gun control if American guns were ending up in the hands of Mexican criminals;
(2) They wanted that to be true so badly, Democrats lied about it;
(3) After they were busted on their lie, the Obama administration began dumping thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican criminals.
We also know that hundreds of people were murdered with these U.S.-government-supplied guns, including at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
But let’s look on the bright side. The BATF was originally going to ship warheads to Iran until realizing the explosions might disable the tracking devices.
(Contrary to more Democrat lies, there was no program to dump thousands of guns in Mexico under George W. Bush. The Bush administration did have a program that put GPS trackers on about 100 guns in order to actually trace them. That operation was ended almost as soon as it began because of the lack of cooperation from Mexican officials. You may as well say Holder’s program was “started” by the first cop who ever put tracer dye on contraband.)
No one has explained what putting 2,500 untraceable guns in the hands of Mexican drug dealers was supposed to accomplish.
But you know what that might have accomplished? It would make the Democrats’ lie retroactively true — allowing them to push for the same gun restrictions they were planning when they first concocted it. A majority of guns recovered from Mexican criminals would, at last, be American guns, because Eric Holder had put them there.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, some brave whistleblower inside the government leaked details of this monstrous scheme. As soon as Congress and the public demanded answers, Holder clammed up. He just says “oops” — and accuses Republicans of racism.
Organized protesters set out to counter the issue of money in politics while marching over a mile through Washington DC last week. The heat index was a blistering 90 degrees, which seemed to add to the marchers’ aggression for their target, former Bush Administration Senior Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. While Rove has been out of the White House for over five years, he has remained active in fundraising for and promotion of conservative causes, particularly through his non-profit, Crossroads GPS.
Many of the protesters took issue with the success of Rove’s 501c4, stating it should be “illegal” even though they were themselves proud representatives of 501c4s. This conflation begs the question: Do these organized protesters even know why they are marching? Or do they even know who they are marching against?
The Blaze set out to uncover this mystery by asking the proud marchers one simple question: “Who is Karl Rove?” You may or not be shocked by their answers.
Minorities, this is what the “enlightened academic left” thinks of you. And this is not just a few radicalized pinheads in Minnesota, this type of senseless race bating, victimology, and stereotyping is typical of “black studies” and other neo-Marxist grievance studies programs in public school and universities in almost every state.
The left needs racial division and must pit one group against another for people to buy their ideology. This goes double for leftist academics who get millions of dollars spent of grievance studies programs, various grievance studies centers, publications etc.
Remember the Un-Fair Campaign, that august collection of enlightened and thoroughly non-racist individuals who believe that whites have an irrevocable privilege that gives them an advantage in society (and that, by extensions minorities will always need special favors to get a leg up)? Well, if you don’t, for the purposes of this story, it may be advisable to rewatch this ad of theirs:
As you can see, the Un-Fair Campaign is aptly named. Their perspective on race is deeply unfair. Fortunately, at least one group has set out to make a video that rebuts the above, and shows how the perspective involved is unfair not just to whites, but to minorities as well. The resulting effort may cause you to spontaneously break out into applause:
What with the refusal of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, one of the Un-Fair Campaign’s biggest institutional sponsors, to defund the organization, this variety of outraged mockery is perhaps the best response.
My friend Scott Ott and his friends at Trifecta had the most thoughtful response to this issue we have yet seen:
Our friends at iowntheworld.com have a delicious post with (full disclosure) my good friend Steven Tucker affording the most awesome schooling to a rather surprisingly open minded young leftist on ObamaCare.
Tucker is one of America’s foremost experts on health insurance law and this poor bloke just happened to run across him with a camera in his hand in Chicago. [Full disclosure: this very writer went to insurance school and passed the state exam for a state Life & Health insurance license. I have written dozens of articles on ObamaCare and Tucker knows it even better than I do.]
In this video, Touré, the one-named host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, attempts to humiliate Alex Schriver for being Republican. He suggests that something happened to him that has forced him into being Republican before Schriver confidently fires back against the MSNBC host for his ignorant and degrading comments.
The 23-year-old Schriver not only speaks intelligently beyond his years, but politely makes MadonnaSealPrince Touré look silly and unknowledgeable about the state of politics.
Schriver, a native of Tennessee and a graduate of Auburn University, is the National Chairman for the College Republican National Committee. Click on the link to check out their great organization that works to promote conservative ideals to college age Americans.
It is probably true. It is no secret that doing business in the United States is very expensive and more risky because of government meddling. There are lots of companies that in order to survive had to leave and that is not Mitt’s fault.
Remember how many Heinz plants the Kerry’s moved overseas?
The only way to fix this problem is with a new, simpler, flatter tax code, regulatory reform and the size of government cut a lot, much like the Deficit Commission said. Without doubt, if we had those reforms companies would keep more jobs at home, yet what party always stands in the way of these common sense reforms?
Of course when companies get driven out of the country or shut down by onerous government or just flat out abuse such as what the Obama Administration did to Gibson Guitar the elite media doesn’t have much to say about that do they?
Remember the stimulus money that went to an electric car company in Finland, and subsidized loans to Brazil to drill in deep water when he was preventing our people from drilling, or how General Electric, whose CEO Jeff Immelt sent jobs overseas shortly after he was appointed Jobs Czar by President Obama?
Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.
During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 