Can't we just repeal the election of 2008?

Right after 2004 and 2000.

So this sounds like a tax on "Cadillac" health insurance plans, which are tax deductible to the employer and sometimes used as a non-salary or non-commission based form of compensation. Does that sound right?

correct. it is the Cadillac tax as people refer to it.

My Dads solution to health insurance is to not have any. Instead he puts the money he would spend on healthcare into a million dollar life insurance policy and is counting on kicking the bucket before he is 65~70. If he ends up in the hospital they cant refuse him healthcare because he doesn't have insurance. Playin' the system while he still can.

Isn't that one of the "conservative" ideas? Reduce the reliance/favoritism on employer-sponsored health insurance plans and provide for more transparent compensation? i.e. Close/shrink a tax code "loophole" and simplify taxation?

i dunno. I thought was just a tax on people receiving badass health care plans from employers, like well paid CEOs.

But IIRC, I remember reading something about high level union leaders being able to keep "cadalliac" health care plans without being levied an excise tax.

I believe the tax gets levied against the employer as well, so it's going to discourage employers from offering to pay over $10,000 a year for employees health care plans.


I do realize the more employers pay on health care the less the have to pay in taxes, so wouldn't the best way to remove "loopholes" (which are perfectly legal and written as laww) would be not to tax something else to discourage a company from paying a tax, but to i dunno, remove the "loophole?"

I honestly don't see how this tax does anything but hurt the people/compaines that can afford to give their employees awesome coverage and do little else to benefit anything/one else.

i agree with you on the accident insurance bit. it would be lots cheaper to pay for accident only policy versus a policy that covers everything. i pay 843/mo for family coverage and it is money wasted every month. a routine physical at the doc's cost 100 dollars cash...sick call is about the same depending on what he has to do. i rather pay 300 or so a year plus a smaller accident only insurance than the current 10k/year to only use about 300 dollars worth of healthcare.

i have to disagree with you on vilifying doctors though. i realize that healthcare is very expensive but a rather large chunk of what you are paying is because of malpractice insurance. it is ungodly expensive and they pass the cost onto the customer. also...medicare and medicaid drive up the cost of healthcare. by law the doc has to charge regular patients no less than he charges medicare and medicaid patients, in essence the government is price fixing healthcare costs.

Good deal we pay the Oboma team to pass a law then we pay someone else to repeal it.. Sure glad it doesn't work like that in the business world

I dont understand the comment...

and nobody is stopping it because the population has grown stupid. most of the public has little knowledge of the constitution and the bill of rights, no one wants to go up against the government machine in fear of retribution. not to mention in our politically correct world you would be labelled a racist, bigot, woman and child hater by the lefties.

there is no victory here...you will see...the constitution has been kicked in the balls. at best the only ones that benefit are the leaches of society.

it is only partially correct. numbers-wise that makes sense. what is important here is that scotus has now made a precedence in allowing the government to use tax as a punishment and or as a way of coercing citizens into complying with an unconstitutional law. notice that in the wording of the law they never called it a tax, they called it a fine, it was scotus who said it could be construed as a tax.

im telling you man, work mandates will save the country!

well they sure are working on mandates....mandate our way into a new soviet union

bro, get a job or no tax rebate for you.

hell i think nowadays you are better off being a bum. free housing, free healthcare, subsidized utilities, food stamps...

you forgot free cell phones and internet.

its a game, that's all, its all in the interpretation. when they called the mandate a tax it was like saying the government is not forcing you to buy the insurance and therefore not be in violation of interstate commerce law...

i sure did...they get that free too don't they

problem with your argument:

When they call the marriage a tax it was like saying the government is not forcing you to get married and therefore not be in violation of interstate commerce law...but when you do get married, you get a tax break.

its just the way i understood what i had read, which could be wrong. do they call marriage a tax? how is marriage related to interstate commerce?

its not related, nor is healthcare. But, not being married is a tax. You receive a tax rebate when you get married.

this is how scotus ruled.

this is why about 20,000 pages of tax code is getting added and the IRS is adding thousands of jobs.

yes you do receive a tax break of some kind for being married. tax code is like reading chinese to me. that's why i dont do my own taxes.

i mean the tax code is longer than all of Shakespeare's written work...

Actually being married is a tax penalty for dual salary income earners with no kids. Being one year I calculated being married cost me about $3000 a year in taxes. You jump into higher tax brackets faster. For example one person enters the 33% tax bracket with income from work at 178k. Say two people working making roughly the same amount as each other well they enter the 33% when they jointly make just 217K not double. at some point I think a deduction went in that lessened this but I can't remember when it happened.

Bob

You know you can choose to file separately and you get the same tax brackets as a single income earner.

yeah, that's what we do. ------- loopholes.

what you guys say makes sense

in my house i am the only income, i have 2 kids and a mortgage and there are other things that are at play that work in my favour for now. still...taxes are very complicated to me, i hate them, i pay someone else to deal with it. i don't make enough to be in the high brackets and i honestly do not even know what it costs me per year in taxes. i work so much i don't really have time to worry about it which im sure its not good.

bottom line is...it is ridiculous how complicated it is and how huge the irs is. i wish someone had the balls to come out with a flat tax, no loopholes, no bullcrap, no irs. the irs should be abolished.

Remember when America was a land of rugged individualism and self-reliance?

Yeah, most people don't.

When the world had direct consequences for bad decisions, laziness, and general apathy, it allowed people to have the logic of cause and effect demonstrated in their lives. This cause and effect was not cruel, but rather, it was instructive. It taught them from an early age the value of forethought, diligent effort, and the value of strengthening your family unit for achieving shared goals.

These days, there is no forethought and seldom is there even reflective afterthought. Diligent effort has been replaced by a slothful sense of entitlement. And the reliance on a strong family unit has been replaced by a variety of checks cut to individuals for breathing and breeding.

How again is it that we are progressing, my dear progressives?

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and another act in 2004. Part of those damn Bush tax cuts for the rich. :vash:

Married filing separate does not give you the same result as splitting the income and filing individual.

Well we've pretty much eliminated the poor, everyone has a job, and no one gets sick. and it only took 60 years of these programs to get here!

You are right. It has been a while since I looked at those tables. I thought it reverted back to single status tables. My mistake.

And 8 years of deregulating industry to get where we are today.

lol. if it wasnt for deregulating industry, everyone would be a millionaire and we'd all be living in uptopia...like back in 2004, before companies like GE moved all their jobs to China.

And it's a good thing the HUD was regulating industry and telling banks/fannie/freddie what sorts of loans they should be handing out...without those polices we'd be worse off today.

Deregulation during the Bush era is a massive myth. It's doublespeak.

But then don't let logic get in the way of your statist cliches.

Here's a paper released in 2008 showing that the budget of regulatory agencies SOARED the previous several years:
http://www.mercatus.org/uploadedFile...7%20Budget.pdf

Here's a document showing the number of pages ADDED to the Federal Register, where regulations are recorded:
http://www.llsdc.org/attachments/wys...-reg-pages.pdf

Pay attention to the Bush years vs. the Clinton years.
MORE pages were added!

-- quoting --

2011 82,419
2010 82,590
2009 69,676
2008 80,700
2007 74,408
2006 78,724
2005 77,752
2004 78,851
2003 75,795
2002 80,332
2001 67,702
2000 83,294
1999 73,880
1998 72,356
1997 68,530
1996 69,368
1995 67,518
1994 68,108
1993 69,688
1992 62,928


Here's an article on the myth:
The Myth of Financial Deregulation - Reason.com

Obviously if you want more regulation then elect more conservative republicans. It has worked that way every time in my lifetime.

But honestly I don’t think it is about the amount of regulation it is about the kind of regulation. Conservatives tend to make regulations for industry and to make them more self-regulated by industry insiders creating financial bubbles environmental disasters and the like. They also like to privatize government functions making it even more corrupt and wasteful while claiming it is making the government smaller even though it cost more to make a few private sector political donors extremely wealthy on government contracts. Progressives tend to regulate for the general welfare of the nation which usually has the effect of reducing business growth usually to more sustainable levels and reduces environmental disasters and the like.

Bob

+1billion

Sustainable means stealing from the earners and giving to the lazy and the willfully stupid.

Common axiom in old socialist/communist Eastern Bloc countries, "The nail that sticks up will get hammered down." Translation: Don't achieve; Be average.

Unsustainable is when a few people acquire a highly disproportionate amount of the wealth that gets generated from the efforts of the hard working, talented, and risk takers because they have control of most of the available capital and have purchased the government with a portion of it to help make sure the rules are such that they are always the winners no mater wether things go good or things go bankrupt. Then you end up with guaranteed winners and guaranteed losers. In a free society that is unsustainable. Giving hedge fund managers, private equity firms, giant investors, and bankers, a free ride on paying for government and costs associated with civilized first world country society needs is a failed Idea. It is pretty much how a fascist government would be run.

Bob

those ------- fat cats. i should hand this laptop back.

I'll take my chances over the governent regulated outcomes.

Have you ever considered that pretty much everything you've posted relies upon a perfect decisions making process and perfect product from our elected officials?

Pick whichever side you like best, then consider that the other will probably take control at least once every 3-terms. I wish I were rich like a Vanderbilt, but I'd rather take my chances where I am, on my own, than rely on Pelosi, Reid, and Hussein to make decisions for me on things like how much money I can make and what kind of hobbies I can have.

I don't think either you or Bob realize it, but you guys are all a lot closer on this subject than you may appreciate. You are all really talking about the problem of "crony capitalism" but just placing different emphasis of which side of the two-headed beast you hate more: corrupt politicians or the capitalists that have managed to buy them.


Though a little long, that Rolling Stone link that blaen posted is worth reading. It's a perfect microcosm of the lack of (or lack of enforcement of) fraud controls.

As a bonus, there is an even longer but even more interesting article on some entrepreneurial guys in their early 20s that managed to become big-time international arms dealers and won a $300 million contract from the Bush Administration's small business initiative. :)

+1

If one thinks of economic favors as having a marketplace, there is a supply and demand. I dare say that there's a lot of supply of economic favors for sale... just look at how much (how little!) Perry "sold" the Girdasil law for, in TX. Allegedly between $5,000 and $30,000:
Perry's 'contributions' from Merck/Gardasil MUCH larger than $5,000 | Peace . Gold . Liberty | Revolution

Remember too that if there were no economic favors to be sold, then there would be none for "the corporations" to buy. We'd by much, much better off if the gov't were not allowed to meddle in the economy (including currency and interest rates).

People like bbundy believe that "if only the right people get elected" or "if only people would quit being stupid and elect good people" (like Obama, </sarcasm>).

The problem here is that megalomaniacs, narcissists, and psychopaths are exactly the ones who WANT to rise to power, who have an ADVANTAGE in rising to power, and are exactly the WRONG people to rise to power. And this is what keeps happening.

The other problem is that even with good people in power, central economic planning DOES NOT WORK. The reason for this is that knowledge in society is spread out among millions of economic actors, each of whom makes economic decisions for themselves, knowledge which cannot be known to any committee so that they can guide society better than if they were left alone. To think otherwise is called THE FATAL CONCEIT. (Yes this includes central banking). This is Hayek's argument.

The wrong assumption that lefties and statists make is that if the free market is left alone (but with individual rights protected and contracts enforced), the results will be less optimal than if a committee with noble intentions and godlike powers were granted power. In a free market, all transactions are VOLUNTARY on both sides. When you have "regulation" (wherein gov't creates rules which micromanage), what you have is a guy with a gun whose made-up rules are sold to the highest bidder.

Lefties believe that a free market tends towards the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. There are boatloads of evidence showing the opposite. That the adoption of (classical) liberalism in trade (aka economic freedom aka laissez faire), since the Enlightenment is what has created, and grown, the middle class.

This belief the lefties have produces results exactly the opposite of that intended. You then get concentration of wealth as the regulatory environment is more and more twisted to protect Big Biz, costs go up, and startup competition is quashed. Health care is THE best example of this, in the past 5 decades.

I don't understand bbundy's firm belief that gov't does better than the private sector in many areas. (Other than wage war lol) Perhaps he could explain where he thinks the proper role of the gov't is, and what things it should and shouldn't run. (I can't imagine him saying that he would like gov't food, gov't clothes, gov't cars, and gov't housing for everyone. He seems to like the idea of gov't cellphones and gov't internet though lol).

Self-reliance, honor, dignity, freedom, oh how I mourn thy passing!

My television bears witness that shame has died as well. It was good when there were acts that a person was ashamed to commit; a little voice was telling you that something was not right to do though you were capable of the act.

Start a pattern of behavior; I see no reason to stop.
You got a habit, got to have it 'til it's finished don't drop
The Charlie Chan's chopped, Pabst pitcher been poured
You got a spare kidney and your liver looks bored
So stop ------- around
You're buying the next round

You wanna be a Thompson, Hemingway, Bukowski
Banging Bill Burroughs lived to 83
You're famous and you're rich, (You're a ------- dickhead)
Quit acting like a bitch

And no one likes you!

.