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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (79513)	5/6/2010 12:08:23 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Your Census boondoggle story of the week By Michelle Malkin on census Add this one to the mountainous, taxpayer-subsidized pile — from my home state of Colorado, via 9News: <<< The U.S. Census Bureau spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on promotional items used to convince more people to mail back their census forms, but a '9Wants to Know' investigation found thousands of the items were dropped off, unused, at a local high school. The leftover items, such as backpacks, cloth grocery bags, hats, pins, magnets and business card holders, were dropped off at Lakewood High School last month. “We probably had, between the backpack style [bags] and the shopping bag style [bags], over 1,000 dropped off,” Lakewood High School Principal Ron Castagna told 9Wants to Know. He estimates more than 1,000 posters printed in different languages were also dropped off at the school. An unknown Census worker walked into the school in mid-April and asked the principal if she could leave the items. She did not ask the school to distribute them. “[She] said, ‘We have extra stuff. We’re wrapping up the Census and we just want to distribute the materials,’” Castagna said. It did not sit well with him. “Wait a minute, times are tough and I’m sitting in a position where we’ve got a school district that’s done everything the right way and yet we’re still going to face budget cuts,” he said. Among the many boxes of posters the Census worker left at the school, were more than 300 promotional posters printed in Farsi. Farsi is the language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. >>>

To: Sully- who wrote (79513)	5/6/2010 3:33:56 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Obamacare – stalking horse for a VAT? By: Mark Tapscott Editorial Page Editor 05/06/10 3:26 PM EDT Slowly but surely the word is spreading that buried deep within Obamacare’s 2,400 pages are all kinds of unpleasant surprises for individual Americans and their families as they seek medical care and insurance coverage. But did you know Obamacare is also a stalking horse for imposing a European-style value-added tax (VAT)on Americans? CNN’s Money desk is raising alarms, though not of an approaching VAT kind: <<< “But under the new rules, if a freelance designer buys a new iMac from the Apple Store, they’ll have to send Apple a 1099. “A laundromat that buys soap each week from a local distributor will have to send the supplier a 1099 at the end of the year tallying up their purchases. “The bill makes two key changes to how 1099s are used. First, it expands their scope by using them to track payments not only for services but also for tangible goods. Plus, it requires that 1099s be issued not just to individuals, but also to corporations. “Taken together, the two seemingly small changes will require millions of additional forms to be sent out.” >>> Curiously enough, though, the CNN writer doesn’t seem to understand what this change in tax law is really all about, settling instead for the government spin. The official explanation is that it was needed to help generate new revenue to pay for Obamacare: <<< “Why did these tax code revisions get included in a health-care reform bill? Welcome to Washington. The idea seems to be that using 1099 forms to capture unreported income will generate more government revenue and help offset the cost of the health bill.” >>> The IRS estimates that the federal government “loses” about $300 billion in annual revenues as a result of business transactions that aren’t reported and therefore don’t boost the amount of taxable income that is reported. “Using 1099s to document millions of transactions that now go un-tracked is one way to begin to close the gap,” according to CNN. But there’s the essential fact that puts this hidden surprise in Obamacare into perspective. With a VAT, government gets to tax a good or service at every stage from its production to it sale. That opens up vast new opportunities for government to collect taxes to help pay for government benefits. That’s why the European welfare states all went to VATs decades ago. It’s also a key reason none of the European economies grow as quickly as the free market economies in North America and Asia, or create new jobs as quickly, or generate entrepreneurial opportunities. For more analysis of the Obama administration’s drive for a VAT, see last week’s Examiner editorial on the tax-hike charade. And for the rest of the CNN report, go here. Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com