Why would Reuters pull this story?

Backdoor Taxes to Hit Middle Class

Earlier today, Reuters ran a story with the preceding headline. Then, suddenly, it was gone.

Poof!

Imagine that. A story that confirms yet another broken promise by President Barack Hussein Obama removed from public view.

Is this censorship? Did the propaganda ministry in the White House black list the story? No explanation from the news agency certainly leads the mind to wonder.

Fortunately, the folks at ShowbizGossips posted the story before the censors decided bad press for Obama isn’t allowed. We’ll repost it here in case they feel the Propaganda Ministry pinch too. Here’s the post Reuters (and the Obama administration?) didn’t want you to see!

The Obama administration’s plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families. In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year — effectively a tax hike by stealth. While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases. The targeted tax provisions were enacted under the Bush administration’s Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Among other things, the law lowered individual tax rates, slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, and steadily scaled back the estate tax to zero in 2010. If the provisions are allowed to expire on December 31, the top-tier personal income tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. But lower-income families will pay more as well: the 25 percent tax bracket will revert back to 28 percent; the 28 percent bracket will increase to 31 percent; and the 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The special 10 percent bracket is eliminated. Investors will pay more on their earnings next year as well, with the tax on dividends jumping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent and the capital-gains tax increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent. The estate tax is eliminated this year, but it will return in 2011 — though there has been talk about reinstating the death tax sooner. Millions of middle-class households already may be facing higher taxes in 2010 because Congress has failed to extend tax breaks that expired on January 1, most notably a “patch” that limited the impact of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT, initially designed to prevent the very rich from avoiding income taxes, was never indexed for inflation. Now the tax is affecting millions of middle-income households, but lawmakers have been reluctant to repeal it because it has become a key source of revenue. Without annual legislation to renew the patch this year, the AMT could affect an estimated 25 million taxpayers with incomes as low as $33,750 (or $45,000 for joint filers). Even if the patch is extended to last year’s levels,the tax will hit American families that can hardly be considered wealthy — the AMT exemption for 2009 was $46,700 for singles and $70,950 for married couples filing jointly. Middle-class families also will find fewer tax breaks available to them in 2010 if other popular tax provisions are allowed to expire. Among them: Taxpayers who itemize will lose the option to deduct state sales-tax payments instead of state and local income taxes; The $250 teacher tax credit for classroom supplies; The tax deduction for up to $4,000 of college tuition and expenses; Individuals who don’t itemize will no longer be able to increase their standard deduction by up to $1,000 for property taxes paid; The first $2,400 of unemployment benefits are taxable, in 2009 that amount was tax-free

That was then, this is now

After Harry Reid and his 59 cronies in the US Senate voted on Christmas Eve to cut Medicare and tax health care benefits of the American middle class, President Obama proudly exclaimed the vote is moving us “toward the end of a nearly century-long struggle” and that the bill “includes the toughest measures ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.”

His remarks are hypocritical in light of what he said on the campaign trail.

But last year an Obama campaign ad blasted Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for proposing what the President is now praising in Reid’s health care bill. Yes, we have the proof because the President’s political hacks failed to seek out and destroy the evidence! The President’s campaign ad may not live long on YouTube if recent history is any guide. So view it while you can.

The first video is Obama’s original campaign ad that slams John McCain for proposing to pay for health care reform by taxing health care benefits and cutting Medicare–both of which are contained in Reid’s health care bill Obama seems so giddy about now. The video below is an edited version of the campaign ad that was adapted to target Reid’s bill.

Please rate the second video if you like it, because the liberals have already started giving it low marks.

Original Campaign Ad Slamming John McCain

Adapted Ad to Fit Reid’s Health Care Bill

CBO: Reid’s bill WILL increase deficit by $170 billion

Once again, Democrats are telling bold-faced lies when they claim their legislation will reduce the deficit and extend the life of Medicare! This time they’re using Bernie Madoff/Enron style accounting tricks to camouflage their lies.

In response to a request by Senator Jeff Sessions, the CBO today released a statement correcting the misrepresentations being propagated by Senate Democrats. Reid, President Obama, and other Democrats are claiming the CBO score indicates the Senate bill will reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years and add 9 years to the lifespan of Medicare.

But the CBO says not so fast. It appears Democrats took great care in phrasing their request to the non-partisan agency, playing a sort of shell game to fool the American people with a slight of hand. Evidently, hen Harry Reid requested the CBO score, he only asked for the impact on the Medicare trust fund balance. That doesn’t sound so bad until you understand what the CBO calls “Trustfund Accounting.”

The Medicare Trust Fund doesn’t actually hold hard assets. It’s more like a drawer full of IOUs issued by the federal government, if it’s operating in the black. The Trust Fund takes money in and pays money out. If it takes in more than it pays out, the government takes the surplus and issues the Trust Fund an IOU.

Now it’s not like the government puts that money in a savings account. Our never frugal government spends that money it collected to pay for Medicare on something else! No plan on how to pay off the IOU when it comes due either. Just pass the debt on down to future generations.

The Trust Fund Accounting system used by the CBO doesn’t account for what happens to the cash once it’s removed from the Trust Fund, or the government’s ability to repay the borrowed money. This accounting method treats Uncle Sam’s IOU the same as you and I treat our bank account. Just like the folks at the Medicare office could walk up to a teller and say “I’d like to withdraw all our money.”

The problem is, there is no money. It’s just a piece of paper that’s waiting for some future Congress to raise taxes on our children to repay the money.

In the current legislation, the CBO saw Reid’s bill would result in approximately $300 billion more being taken into the Medicare Trust Fund than it would pay out in the next. So Obama, Reid, and Pelosi will write out a professional looking IOU, hand it to the Medicare Trust Fund accountant and leave with $300 billion of taxpayers’ money. That money will be used to create new federal programs, fund abortions, pay bureaucrats, and other creative ways government finds to squander money.

“To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”

But to make it look nice, Reid and his Democrat cohorts rigged it to look like $130 billion won’t be spent. So, in effect the deficit should be reduced by $130 billion. Sounds good right?

The problem is, they’re also trying to claim the entire $300 billion (of which they’ve blown $170 billion) is used to extend the viability of Medicare. Put simply, they want to spend the $170 billion now and say the $170 billion IOU they issued is going to keep Medicare going. Now, no one can be 100% sure, but it seems like doctors will probably start quitting when they begin getting government IOUs instead of greenbacks for compensation!

Obama, Reid, and other Democrats are counting that $170 billion twice. They’ve taken $300 billion from us they say we’ll get back in Medicare benefits. They’ve spent all but $130 billion of it, but continue to claim they’ve set aside the entire $300 billion for our benefit!

Here’s the real kicker. The only way we get that $170 billion in benefits we were promised is to raise taxes on our children!

This is nothing short of stealing from future generations! Harry Reid and his Democrat Senate comrades are nothing more than two-bit con artists who would sell our children’s future to satisfy our President who suffers with an “unprecedented” level of egotism and narcissism.

Tomorrow at 7:00 AM Eastern they vote to saddle our children and grandchildren with higher taxes, higher deficits, and a lower standard of living. Tomorrow morning, they will slap themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for conning us out of more of our money.

They’ll be home until the middle of January. Make a point of letting your Senators know you haven’t been fooled. Make sure they understand you know what they’re up to, and that you’ll do everything in your power to send them home when they’re next up for reelection.

How Much Obamacare Costs the Average Family

by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann at Townhall.com

Whether or not you now have health insurance, Obama’s health care bill will cost you dearly.

If you don’t have insurance, you will be required to buy it. The legislation specifies how much you will have to pay for the coverage before any subsidy kicks in. All during the campaign, Obama kept speaking about affordable coverage. Now it appears that his definition of “affordable” might be a bit elastic.

If your household income is $66,000 a year, slightly above the national average, Obama’s health care bill will require you to spend 12 percent of your income — about $8,000 a year or almost $700 a month — to buy health insurance before you get any federal subsidy.

Even those making less will have to reach deep into their meager resources to satisfy Obama’s statutory requirement. Families scraping by on only $44,0000 a year will have to pay 7 percent of their income (about $3,000) on insurance. Even those making just $33,000 will have to ante up 4.5 percent of their income (about $1,500) for health insurance. The required payments reach so far down the scale that those who are living at the federal poverty level of $22,000 will have to shell out 2 percent of their totally inadequate incomes ($440) for insurance.

That Obama is charging premiums to those living at or on the border of poverty is absolutely incredible! And this from a candidate who pledged that he would not tax the middle class!

If you have insurance, you will get hit by his proposed 40 percent tax on insurance premiums.

…More

CNN serves in Propaganda Ministry for Obamacare

Before we showed you a teacher using her class to indoctrinate the next generation as worshipers of Obama.  But now it’s getting worse.

Watch the video below to see CNN acting as the propaganda arm for the Obama administration in its bid to sell a  government takeover of the US health care system.  Worse yet, the network uses school children to help the President sell his flawed plan.

It’s no longer just indoctrination instead of education, but now we’re seeing the MSM volunteer its services to the Propaganda Ministry of the administration.

Liberal Lies on National Health Care–Part 7

by Ann Coulter at Townhall.com

(This article is the seventh in a series. Click here for part one and part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six.)

(18) America’s lower life expectancy compared to countries with socialist health care proves that their medical systems are superior.

President Obama has too much intellectual pride to make such a specious argument, so instead we have to keep hearing it from his half-wit supporters.

These Democrats are all over the map on where precisely Americans place in the life-expectancy rankings. We’re 24th, according to Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Barbara Boxer; 42nd, according to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell; 35th, according to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson; and 47th, according to Rep. Dennis Kucinich. So the U.S. may have less of a “life expectancy” problem than a “Democratic math competency” problem.

But also, as described in last week’s column, the citizenry’s health is not the same thing as the citizenry’s health care system.

Besides America’s high rate of infant mortality — based on biology and lifestyle choices, not medical care — Americans are also more likely to overeat or smoke than people in other developed nations. And the two biggest killers in the Western world are obesity and smoking.

Liberals shouldn’t have to be reminded how fat Americans are, inasmuch as they are always chortling about it. A 2004 New York Times article leeringly quoted a foreign doctor, saying: “We Europeans, whenever we came to America, we always noticed the enormous number of obese people on the streets.” I note that these are the same people who openly worship Michael Moore.

…More

More Liberal Lies About National Healthcare!

by Ann Coulter at Townhall.com

(This article is the sixth in a series. Click here for part one and part two, part three, part four and part five.)

(17) America’s low ranking on international comparisons of infant mortality proves other countries’ socialist health care systems are better than ours.

America has had a comparatively high infant mortality rate since we’ve been measuring these things, going back to at least the ’20s. This was the case long before European countries adopted their cradle-to-grave welfare schemes and all while the U.S. was the wealthiest country on Earth.

One factor contributing to the U.S.’s infant mortality rate is that blacks have intractably high infant mortality rates — irrespective of age, education, socioeconomic status and so on. No one knows why.

Neither medical care nor discrimination can explain it: Hispanics in the U.S. have lower infant mortality rates than either blacks or whites. Give Switzerland or Japan our ethnically diverse population and see how they stack up on infant mortality rates.

Even with a higher-risk population, the alleged differences in infant mortality are negligible. We’re talking about 7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in the U.S. compared to 5 deaths per 1,000 for Britain and Canada. This is a rounding error — perhaps literally when you consider that the U.S. tabulates every birth, even in poor, small and remote areas, while other countries are not always so meticulous.

But the international comparisons in “infant mortality” rates aren’t comparing the same thing, anyway. We also count every baby who shows any sign of life, irrespective of size or weight at birth.

By contrast, in much of Europe, babies born before 26 weeks’ gestation are not considered “live births.” Switzerland only counts babies who are at least 30 centimeters long (11.8 inches) as being born alive. In Canada, Austria and Germany, only babies weighing at least a pound are considered live births.

…More

What Just Happened to U.S. National Security While Nobody Was Looking

from the USFF Editorial Board

Washington, D.C. – Over the past week President Barack Obama conceded any future armed conflict between the United States and Red China, Russia, and Islamic Fascists.

The President first announced he was dropping our missile defense plans in Eastern Europe that we have been developing since the 1980s under then President Ronald Reagan.

For our allies (maybe former allies is now the word) Poland and Czechoslovakia, this means continued vulnerability to the nuclear arsenal of a reviving Communist Russia, that occupied and brutalized both countries for over fifty years. With impeccable timing, Obama announced the move on the exact 70th anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland.

This accomplishes two feats for our enemies. One, Eastern Europe will not have a shield from Russian nuclear missiles. Two, since Poland and Czechoslovakia are in the direct flight path of a missile fired from Iran at New York or Washington, we have lost our best ground-based chance to knock down an intercontinental ballistic missile attack from the Middle East.

Then yesterday came the Obama speech at the United Nations, during which he called for the total nuclear disarmament of all nations, including the United States.

Now that’s a lofty goal for a world in which all nations respect the borders, sovereignty, and human rights of all. But that’s not the world we live in.

Red China has been actively and publicly preparing for war with the United States for decades. Their advantage is manpower, where they outnumber us by more than three-to-one with over 1.3 billion people compared to our 300 million. We currently have the edge in technology, conventional weapons systems, and nuclear deterrence.

But thanks to Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress giving this rogue nation most-favored trade status in 1999, China is rapidly closing the technology and weapons gap, leaving nuclear deterrence as the only power safeguard against Chinese aggression against not just the United States, but our allies Taiwan, Japan, or the Philippines.

Meanwhile, radical Islamic-fascists worldwide have vowed the total destruction of America unless we renounce the Bill of Rights, designate Islam the official religion of the United States, and subject all non-Islamic citizens to second-class status as called for in the Koran. And there are currently nuclear arsenals under construction in Iran and North Korea to make that threat a real possibility.

The only thing standing in the way of such a nuclear terror attack is our willingness to mount a pre-emptive strike against those facilities if necessary, or if we fail to do so, to meet a nuclear terror attack against us with a devastating counterattack.

As of yesterday, September 23, 2009, our President Barack Obama told the world he is willing to give that away. Today he voted in the United Nations Security Council for this resolution, without requiring a word in the document dealing with the nuclear proliferation of Iran or North Korea.

If we follow this plan for total unilateral nuclear disarmament, we have relegated our nation, now with the most powerful defense system in the world, to permanent subservient status to communist and radical Islamic tyranny.

Make no mistake – that will be the end of the American middle class, as we join the rest of the world in poverty, oppression, and second-class rights.

Partisan politics, class warfare, and a blatantly biased media have brought us to this brink of national extinction. Now is the time for the great silent majority in this country to awaken, get off the sofa and take back our inheritance of self-government from those who have so gamed our political system to leave us with no real choices in public policy at the polls other than gradual submission to one-world government.

It is indeed time for some real “change.”

###

US Freedom Foundation

Liberal Lies About National Health Care, Part 5

by Ann Coulter at Townhall.com

(15) Democrats lost Congress in 1994 because President Clinton failed to pass national health care.

I’m not sure if this is another example of the left’s wishful-thinking method of analysis or if they’re seriously trying to trick the Blue Dog Democrats into believing it. But I gather liberals consider the 1994 argument an important point because it was on the front page of The New York Times a few weeks ago in place of a story about Van Jones or ACORN.

According to a news story by Jackie Calmes: “In 1994, Democrats’ dysfunction over fulfilling a new president’s campaign promise contributed to the party’s loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress.”

That’s not the way I remember it. The way I remember it, Republicans swept Congress in 1994 not because Clinton failed to nationalize health care, but because he tried to nationalize health care. HillaryCare failed because most Americans didn’t want it. (For more on this, see “ObamaCare.”)

Bill Clinton had run as an old-school, moderate Democrat and then, as soon as he got elected, immediately became Che Guevara. (What is it with all our black presidents and these bait-and-switch tactics?)

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Dems vote to keep you in the dark on Baucus bill

Today Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee refused to approve a Republican amendment to make the full text of Chairman Max Baucus’ (D-MT) bill available to the public 72 hours before a vote. Democrats in the Senate are determined not to repeat the biggest mistake of their allies in the US House in the battle for Obamacare.

As spring turned to summer this year, it appeared President Obama’s sweeping Socialist agenda would be put in place with virtually no resistance on Capitol Hill. The Tea Parties had already begun, but with virtually no coverage by the mainstream media their impact had done little to slow the President’s blitzkrieg to re-engineer the social and economic systems of the country.

Then House Democrats made their fatal mistake. They released the gargantuan 1,018 page bill, HR 3200.

At the time they thought they had nothing to fear. After all, 1,000 plus pages of legal jargon and sub-paragraphs nested three and four deep inside other sub-paragraphs, with references to sections of the bill hundreds of pages away, and even references to other sections of the US Code would make the bill virtually indecipherable to the voting public. Or so they thought!

House Democrats, and the President himself, thought they had little to fear by opening the bill to public scrutiny. Because they thought the American public wasn’t smart enough to understand the bill. They didn’t count on the devotion of conservatives who dove in and tore the legislation apart. Struggling through the nested references, the legal jargon, and other obfuscatory tactics utilized in the writing, conservative activists put Obamacare under a very powerful microscope. And the American public began to understand just how dangerous this government takeover of our health care industry would be.

Even as line after line of the bill was exposed, President Obama, his administration, and Congressional Democrats repeated lie after lie that was debunked by the text of the bill they thought nobody could read. Conservative America mobilized to let these lying national leaders know they weren’t buying it anymore. The White House sent congressional Dems home for the August recess armed with lies to tell their constituents, but in the trenches these legislators came face to face with voters armed with facts gleaned from the pages of the Democrats’ own bill. By the end of the recess, Obama’s health care shock troops (Democratic congressmen) were turned back and his offensive bogged down.

The President’s last hope to nationalize the nation’s health care system lay with the Senate Finance Committee, which had been working for months to hammer out a bipartisan health care bill. Soon after legislators returned to DC, Chairman Baucus gave up on compromise and issued his vision for a Finance Committee Obamacare bill.

But Baucus and his Lieutenants have learned from the mistakes of the past. He and his Democratic colleagues don’t want the light of public scrutiny to shine on this bill before a vote. Arguing against the amendment was Senator John Kerry (D-MA), “Let’s be honest about it, most people don’t read the legislative language.” What he meant was Democrats don’t want those who can understand it to read it.

Please take a moment to let your Senators and Representative know that if they don’t want to let us know what’s in the bill, we don’t want them to represent us any longer!

Click here to send a fax to your Senators and Representative. Or use the links on the right side of this page to contact them by email and/or phone.