Tag: Leviathan

They would have never bothered her if she were on welfare

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They Would Have Never Bothered Her if She Were on Welfare

Unbelievable. No, actually, too believable. I found this at AR15.com. The title of this post comes from the first response to the original post:

$10 an hour with 2 kids? IRS pounces

Rachel Porcaro knows she’s hardly rich. When you’re a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don’t need government experts to tell you how broke you are.

Rachel Porcaro knows she’s hardly rich. When you’re a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don’t need government experts to tell you how broke you are.

But that’s what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.

It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.

She couldn’t believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.

“I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — ‘I don’t have anything, why are you auditing me?’ ” Porcaro recalled. “I said, ‘Why me, when I don’t own a home, a business, a car?’ “

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

“They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area,” says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle’s G.A. Michael and Co. “The auditor said, ‘You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”

“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”

RTWT. It gets worse.

But I’ll skip to the dénouement:

Rachel says an irony of her year in tax hell is that the IRS is right about one thing — you can’t get by in Seattle on what she makes. That’s why she’s living with her parents. To try to make a life in our shimmering city without relying on welfare, food stamps or other public assistance.

“We’re an Italian family,” she said. “We’re surviving as a tribe. It seems like we got punished for that.”

Of course you did. Can’t have the plebes fending for themselves. The next thing you know, they’ll start thinking that they don’t need government.

At the time of this posting, there are 420 comments on the original story. The natives seem restless.

Hopenchangen Hopenhagen Carbonhagen

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Hopenchangen Hopenhagen Carbonhagen

So Obamateur is flying to Carbonhagen on his way to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize to inspire other World Leaders™ to Do the Right Thing© and cut per capita CO2 emissions back to 19th Century levels in order to Save the Planet!©™® In the mean time, the Imperial Senate Democrats are preparing to throw their female constituency under the bus® by prohibiting Federal funds from being used to pay for abortions just so they can get Health Care Reform©™® passed and fvck the rest of us, too.

Just when do the actions of our Congressweasels fall to the level of “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object…a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”?

Just askin’.

UPDATE: Who needs Carbonhagen? The EPA can just make sh!t up as they go!

Quote of the Day – “Health Care Reform” Edition

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The health-care debate presents the kind of sharp ideological contrast that makes it hard for unprincipled politicians to seek shelter in the mushy bog of the middle ground. Over the weekend, the libertarian Cato Institute calculated that the true cost of ObamaCare would exceed $6 trillion, after the various deceits used to make it seem close to revenue-neutral are stripped away. How much does real estate in the “middle ground” of such outrageous spending cost? Three trillion? When a radical program of such massive size is proposed, anything less than determined opposition is equivalent to submission.

— Dr. Zero, The Consent of the Governed

The Christian Science Monitor Piles On

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The Christian Science Monitor Piles On

Senate health care bill: the five paragraphs you must read

1. Mandatory insurance

Bill text: “Sec. 1501. Requirement to Maintain Minimum Essential Coverage…. An applicable individual shall for each month beginning after 2013 ensure that the individual, and any dependent of the individual who is an applicable individual, is covered under minimum essential coverage for such month.”

Translation: Uncle Sam will now serve as your national insurance agent and force you to buy “minimum essential coverage” – or else you’ll have to pay an annual fine.

However, what Congress considers “minimum essential coverage” and “essential health benefits requirements” includes comprehensive coverage that many neither need nor want. Plus, those who prefer to carry catastrophic-only coverage won’t have a free range of options for such coverage.

Bottom line: In a free society, the government should not force citizens to buy any product nor should the government mandate citizens’ level of health-insurance coverage.

—

2. Electronic data exchanges

Bill text: “Sec. 1104. Administrative Simplification…. (h) Compliance. – (1) Health Plan Certification. – (A) Eligibility for a Health Plan, Health Claim Status, Electronic Funds Transfers, Health Care Payment and Remittance Advice. – Not later than December 31, 2013, a health plan shall file a statement with the Secretary, in such form as the Secretary may require, certifying that the data and information systems for such plan are in compliance with any applicable standards (as described under paragraph (7) of section 1171) and associated operating rules (as described under paragraph (9) of such section) for electronic funds transfers, eligibility for a health plan, health claim status, and health care payment and remittance advice, respectively.”

Translation: Requiring everyone to buy federally sanctioned health insurance, and then forcing qualified plans to comply with Administrative Simplification requirements, provides the government and health industry with power they would not be able to exercise in a free market.

Administrative Simplification rules are a product of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. They lay the foundation for a nationally linked database of personal health information.

Read the rest. Call your Congresscritters. Tell them you’re not kidding. Feathers, tar, rail – some assembly required.

Thanks to reader juris_imprudent for the pointer.

Congressional Legerdemain

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Congressional Legerdemain

Michael Barone points out an article in the New York Post by Jefferey H. Anderson that illustrates just how much the Senate’s proposed Health Care bill will really cost, as opposed to what they’re trying to sell us.

It’s like they think the Great Unwashed can’t understand mortgages with variable interest rates and balloon payments, or something.

They tell us that the first ten years of this wonderful plan will cost only (only!) $849 billion over the first ten years.

Nazzo fast, Guido.

Here’s a chart that shows how they get that number (click to embiggen):


Anderson says in his piece:

As the CBO analysis indicates, the bill’s real 10-year costs would start in 2014. And in its true first decade (2014 to 2023), the CBO projects the bill’s costs to be $1.8 trillion — double the price Reid is advertising.

And that’s even though the CBO optimistically assumes the government-run “public option” wouldn’t cost a cent.

Over this same 10-year span, the bill would hike taxes and fines by $892 billion — more than the alleged price of the bill.

On top of this, Anderson expands:

Just as problematic are the bill’s effects on entitlement spending and deficits. Medicare is already teetering on the edge of insolvency. This year’s Medicare Trustees Report (signed by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius) warns that the Medicare Hospital Trust Fund — the main funding channel for the largest part of Medicare — will become insolvent in 2017.

Worse, nearly four people are now paying into Medicare for every beneficiary. But with the baby boomers’ retirement fast approaching, that number will drop over the next 20 years to about 2½. Fewer and fewer people will be paying higher and higher costs.

Yet, as the CBO notes, in its real first decade, the bill would siphon $802 billion from Medicare to spend elsewhere. With its financial outlook already beyond bleak, Medicare is the last place to look to for “free” money.

Among the $802 billion that Reid would divert from Medicare is $431 billion in cuts in doctors’ pay (far more than the misleading figure for 2010-19). The bill says it would cut payments to doctors for services to Medicare patients by 23 percent in 2011 — and never raise them back up, ever.

No one who’s been in Washington for more than five minutes actually expects this reduction to occur — and if it doesn’t, then the Senate health bill would increase our deficits by $286 billion in its true first decade, according to CBO projections.

Read the whole thing.

In comments yesterday, Markadelphia asked:

(W)hy does the government want to get into health care? Several answers suggest themselves. With Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip and state run health care, they already are fairly involved. But what is their motivation for this current push for historic legislation?

“Historic.” Yeah, there’s an appropriate adjective. “Little Boy” was an historic bomb in the same way this legislation is “historic.” I want to attribute good intentions to our elected overseers, I really do. But if you wanted to destroy the American health care system and the American economy, I find it difficult to believe that you wouldn’t see this bill as a means to that end. Same for Cap and Trade.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

“The greatest middle class in the face of the Earth”

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“The greatest middle class in the face of the Earth”

Mr. Bill emailed me this:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G44NCvNDLfc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&w=425&h=344]
That’s Mike Rogers, representing the 8th District of Michigan (yes, that district really does exist). Pretty good rant.

UPDATE: Both Ed “What the” Heckman and Jerry the Geek point out in comments that Rep. Rogers’ attribution of a quote to Abraham Lincoln is incorrect. Jerry details the facts in an excellent follow-on post.

In a Mature Society, “Civil Servant” is Semantically Equal to “Civil Master”

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In a Mature Society, “Civil Servant” is Semantically Equal to “Civil Master”

The title of this post is a quote from Robert Heinlein’s The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, and it is echoed by Brit Phil B’s essay from last week, specifically this bit:

You must understand the nature of the Politicians, Quangos (Quasi Autonomous Non Governmental Organisations) and the Civil Service (which is neither civil or a servant but a Master). Ministers come and go and are briefed by the civil servants but it is the Civil Service which effectively runs the country.

RedState expands on a memo released by the US Office of Personnel Management yesterday, explaining:

Obama Administration Intends to Purge Republicans From the Civil Service

It is a typical Washington process that many political appointees are able to take jobs within the civil service once their political appointment expires — usually at the conclusion of one administration. What often happens as well is Congressional staffers, before an election or shortly thereafter, will move over to the Executive Branch placed into the civil service, in effect, by appointment.

So, for example, when George Bush became President in 2001, a number of Clinton political appointees became civil service employees. As a result, they became subject to civil service hiring and firing rules, which meant they could no longer be replaced simply for having been a Democratic appointee.

Barack Obama is changing that. He intends to purge all Republicans from the federal bureaucracy retroactive to five years ago.

My favorite quote from the memo:

I believe we must hold ourselves and the government to a higher standard, one that honors and supports the President’s strong commitment to a Government that is transparent and open.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Indecision is Statesmanship, and Transparency is Opacity. So far I haven’t seen Obama show a “strong commitment” to anything other than getting elected. But he apparently deeply understands how to manipulate the levers of power.