Category Archives: regulation

Obamacare, the IRS, Privacy, and Whose Money Is It, Anyway?

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Here is a partial list, courtesy of Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business, of the additional privacy invasions in which Obamacare requires the IRS to engage, in order to ensure that you, “private” citizen, are complying with the Progressive Government’s determination of what is appropriate for you.  Understand, you’ve lost the right to determine what level or type of health insurance coverage is appropriate—the Progressive Government will determine that for you.  You’ve also lost the right to determine what level of coverage is affordable according to your own—or your small (or large) business’ estimate—expense pattern and what you’ve decided you’re willing to pay—the Progressive Government will determine that for you.

According to the Taxpayer Advocate Office, we erstwhile private citizens must tell the government’s man, under Obamacare,

  • our insurance plan information, including who is covered under the plan and the dates of coverage;
  • costs of [our] family’s health insurance plans;
  • whether [any of us] had an offer of employer-sponsored health insurance;
  • cost of employer-sponsored insurance;
  • whether [any of us] received a premium tax credit;
  • whether [any of us] has an exemption from the individual responsibility requirement.

Moreover, the IRS under Obamacare is requiredauthorized to talk with folks about us with whom they never before had routine contact—all to ensure that we’re “paying our fair share.”  This list includes

  • new state-run insurance exchanges;
  • employers;
  • insurance companies;
  • government insurance programs.

Your W-2 no longer is enough; now the IRS will be quizzing your employer in great detail.  The fact that you do, or don’t, have health insurance coverage no longer is a private matter; the Progressive Government will be quizzing your insurer.

On top of this, if we must pay a penaltytax because we don’t have the Progressive Government’s definition of “adequate” coverage, that tax is designed to be the maximum collectable, not the minimum.  The tax is either a fixed dollar amount, or a percentage of our income above the filing threshold, whichever is greater.  Even common criminals, on conviction, don’t automatically get the maximum sentence in every case.  But then, your money really isn’t yours, anyway—it’s the property of the Progressive Government; it’s just ensuring it gets every bit of its property.  And the criteria for determining the size of our tax?  They include more destruction of our privacy:

  • the IRS determines our “household income,” the sum of the incomes of everyone living under our roof
  • the IRS will demand to know the insurance coverage of each person living under our roof.

If anyone is lacking proper insurance, you get the tax.

It’s just as bad for the small businesses that we “private” citizens run, now for the benefit of government rather than for our own purposes.  Here’s an example of the penaltytax “your” small business must pay.

Businesses with more than 50 employees are required under Obamacare to provide “adequate” health insurance coverage for all of their employees.

The tax is $2,000 per employee, but the business must first knock out from the math the first 30 workers—part-timers don’t count.

Example: If you have 51 full-time employees and 15 part-time employees throughout the year, and one full-time employee is receiving a tax credit to help them buy health insurance [because you’re not providing “adequate,” “affordable” insurance for that employee], your business will have to pay:

51 (the number of full time employees) – 30 (the first 30 employees are excluded)

21 x $2,000 = $42,000

Notice that: one employee is getting short-changed (according to the Progressive Government), so we pay the penalty on a multiplicity of employees.

Think about the effect this will have on hiring.

Read Ms MacDonald’s entire article to see a fuller the list of abuses Obamacare heaps on what used to be “our” businesses.

Remember all of this in November.

President Obama’s Obamacare Tax Increase on the Middle Class

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Straight from the horse’s mouth.  Chief Justice John Robert’s Majority Opinion includes this [emphasis added]:

The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.  That Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, not to order individuals to engage in it.  In this case, however, it is reasonable to con­strue what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance.  Such legislation is within Con­gress’s power to tax.

The whole opinion, and the two dissents, can be read here.

Europe’s Labor Problems

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Aside from the debt and profligate spending problem, Europe’s labor laws are large contributors.  The Wall Street Journal recently described Italian labor law.  And Italy is not atypical for Europe.

  • Business pays 2/3 of each employee’s social security costs (I won’t go into how cheap we Americans are compared to the Europeans when it comes to social security).
  • Businesses with more than 10 employees (quoting the WSJ)

must submit an annual self-assessment to the national authorities outlining every possible health and safety hazard to which your employees might be subject.  These include stress that is work-related or caused by age, gender and racial differences.  You must also note all precautionary and individual measures to prevent risks, procedures to carry them out, the names of employees in charge of safety, as well as the physician whose presence is required for the assessment.

  • Businesses with more than 15 employees encounter very onerous limits on the ability to fire an employee, for any reason.
  • Businesses with more than 15 employees also must explicitly hire disabled—qualified or not—and must have at least 14 disabled employees when they go above 50 employees.  The businesses must maintain that 7% ratio at all larger sizes.
  • Businesses with more than 100 employees must submit to the government a biennial report on the gender dynamics within the company.  This report must include a tabulation of the men and women employed in each production unit, their functions and level within the company, details of compensation and benefits, and dates and reasons for recruitments, promotions and transfers, as well as the estimated revenue impact.

The WSJ cites the OECD as noting that

All of these protections and assurances, along with the bureaucracies that oversee them, subtract 47.6% from the average Italian wage….  Two-thirds of that bite comes before payroll, meaning many Italian workers are unaware of their gross cost to employers.

I mean, really.  YGTBSM.

Hope and Change

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The last 3½ years have seen a lot of this slogan.  While the hope—for the better—waned long ago, President Obama has, in fact, achieved quite a lot in the way of change.  Here are some of those changes:

He got Obamacare rammed through, albeit in the dark of night in a wholly, cynically, partisan manner, and he did it without a single Progressive (or Republican, come to that) congressman actually reading the bill prior to voting on it—some proud in their ignorance.  This bill achieves quite a lot: it lets children extend their childhoods and parental dependencies to their 26th year, by staying on mumsy’s and popsy’s health insurance policies.  It adds to the Federal deficit with its trillion-dollar costs.  It lets you, taxpayers, pay for coverage for an additional 20+ million health insurees.  It nationalizes the health care and health insurance industries.

He got Dodd-Frank rammed through in the same manner and with the same level of Congressional ignorance.  And pride of ignorance.  This bill also achieves quite a lot.  It creates a fourth branch of government in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.  These two agencies are wholly unaccountable to the Congress—and so to us—are not under control of the President, and at least the CFPB’s budget comes, on demand, from the Federal Reserve System.  Yet these two will, single-handedly and without oversight, determine whether financial institutions will be allowed to do business (vis., extend loans or credit of any sort—even at your corner mom and pop grocery store) and the conditions under which they will be allowed to do so.

He’s achieved a trillion-dollar cut in our defense capacity at a time of rising PRC aggressiveness, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and an expansive, grasping Russia.  This includes a shrinking Navy, a gutted Army, and an Air Force with little capacity for anything other than looking pretty in fly-bys.

In an apparent nod to an earlier Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, he’s leaking every cyber-warfare and counter-terrorism secret we used to have to the news outlets.  Apparently, if we have no secrets, other gentlemen have no need to resist the temptation to read ours.  Or he subscribes to the theory that if we tell our enemies everything we have, we don’t need to spend our resources trying to figure out what they know about us (another savings!).  Or both.

He’s instructed his DoD to desist using unpleasant interrogation techniques.  And, since he believes our enemies have no knowledge of anything that’s of intelligence value at all, he’s instituted a program of killing them rather than capturing them and having to figure out how to hold them and question them.  And he brags about personally selecting, by name, the ones that are to be assassinated—a Roman circus thumbs down from the Emperor.

No, Obama has wrought enormous change.  Just all of it has been destructive of our great nation.

We need to fix this.

Another Out of Control Regulation

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This regulation began as a Bush the Younger administration’s EPA attempt to work on an environmental problem now known to be non-existent.  Unfortunately, it’s being continued under an Obama administration EPA for no reason other than a cynical exercise in governmental power for the sake of that power.

The regulation in question is the EPA’s requirement that oil refiners mix into their refined fuels millions of gallons of a cellulosic ethanol, even though that additive does not exist.  This has the refiners in a quandary because the EPA is intent on fining them heavily for their failure to use this ghost chemical.

Tom Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research points out that

None, not one drop of cellulosic ethanol has been produced commercially. It’s a phantom fuel.  It doesn’t exist in the market place.

He goes on

Why would [the EPA] ask them to blend any at all if it doesn’t exist?  Because they know that they can squeeze some extra dollars out of them.

On the other hand, the EPA does have the authority to relax the requirement, and apparently they’re in the process of that.  The cellulosic ethanol blending requirement is, supposedly, being reduced by 98%.  Thus, in the end, the refiners only need to use 2% of this non-existent additive compared to their original requirement.  There’s a break.  Charles Drevna, representing refiners, has the right of this.

[The EPA is] forcing us to use a product that doesn’t exist; they might as well tell us to use unicorns.

He added

We’ve had to go to the courts and litigate this thing is because [the EPA] just turned a blind eye to us[.]

They have to because that mandate, the potential per centage reduction notwithstanding, just gets larger and larger: 500 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol this year, 3 billion in 2015, and 16 billion in 2022.  Never mind that nobody is making this stuff.

It shouldn’t have come to this.