by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY, OBAMA, TAXES
We first heard that the GDP contraction of 1% was an anomaly. Now, the Commerce Department has revised its report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, stating the the GDP fell -2.9% in the first quarter.
Here’s the summary:
“Real GDP declined 2.9 percent in the first quarter, after increasing 2.6 percent in the fourth. This downturn in the percent change in real GDP primarily reflected a downturn in exports, a larger decrease in private inventory investment, a deceleration in PCE, and downturns in nonresidential fixed investment and in state and local government spending that were partly offset by an upturn in federal government spending”.
Exports dropped 8.9%
Real final sales of domestic product dropped 1.3%
Real nonresidential fixed investment decreased 1.2%
Nonresidential structures decreased 7.7%
Equipment decreased 2.8%
Real residential fixed investment decreased 4.2%
The one bright spot? Intellectual property products increased 6.3%
You can read the highlights of the report here, along with the May durable-goods report and business investment outlook.
If we see a negative GDP after the second quarter, we’ll be in recession territory again.
by | ARTICLES, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
You can’t have anyone that stupid be in charge at NBC.
Chuck Todd, who is NBC’s “Chief White House Correspondent” and also NBC’s “Political Director”, is out there mischaracterizing the IRS scandal. To blame it on 501c4s is utterly incomprehensible.
Yesterday on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown”, Chuck Todd gave this statement:
CHUCK TODD: Time now for my “Takeaway.” The controversy surrounding IRS may be more than a year old but of course we’re still talking about it. On Monday, the IRS Commissioner testified before Congress. A week after the IRS told Senate investigators that two years of e-mails disappeared in a computer crash back in 2011. While this certainly doesn’t make the Obama administration nor the IRS look very good, it’s important to remember what this actual story is about because it’s gotten lost.
The question at hand is whether explicitly political organizations should be filing as tax exempt social welfare groups under the tax code and both political parties are pointing blame. Republicans say that just conservative-sounding groups were targeted by the IRS. That’s why they want to see the e-mails. Democrats have responded by claiming, hey, liberal groups were targeted, too. But here is the story many are missing. Why should primarily political organizations get a taxpayer exemption, basically get a handout from the tax code? Both sides are in an uproar because they couldn’t take advantage of a borderline shady way to raise money for political purposes or launder money for political purposes.
So while the IRS is certainly not a good guy here they have been terrible about being forthcoming. Are there any actual real victims? Folks, this scandal is not black and white since frankly two wrongs don’t make a right. We know what really is working here for Republicans. Beating up the IRS, good for the base. Good politics there makes for great fundraising e-mails. But let’s remember what the controversy itself is about.
The problem is that Chuck Todd is flat-out wrong. 501c4s are not a way to engage in political spending. They are issue advocacy groups, and always have been — for nearly 100 years. Never until this administration has anyone had a problem with 501c4s.
The real crux of the problem is that the IRS attempting to try to turn issue advocacy — which is a first amendment, free speech issue — into political speech, so they can try to curb it. This was clearly evident in the recent uproar with the IRS trying to re-write the rules on 501c4s, which generated tens of thousands of comments in protest.
The short version is that issue advocacy deals with issues (free speech) and is not “political”, whereas advocating for a candidate or a party is “political”. It may not be a perfect divider, but it has worked quite well, and no one has even suggested anything better.
Proving Chuck Todd to be even more clueless is the fact that 501 c4 organizations do not really get any tax benefits from their “tax exemption”. All a 501c4 is, is a group of people pooling their after tax money to pay for a non- deductible expenditure. There are never “profits”, the receipt of funds from its members is not income, and the expenditure of these funds are not “deductions”. Just as there is no tax effect from an individual spending on issue advocacy, there should be no tax effect from individuals pooling their funds for the same spending. The IRS granting of 501c4 status is just recognizing the obvious.
Chuck Todd is either disingenously preying on low-information viewers to not know the differences between 501c4s and other tax-exempt organizations, or else he really is that stupid. Either way, he should submit his resignation today.
by | ARTICLES, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
During testimony on June 23rd, the IRS Commissioner could not name a law or statue that he has reviewed to make certain no law has been broken. Rep. Trey Gowdy did the superb questioning.
From the Weekly Standard:
“You have already said, multiple times today, that there was no evidence that you found of any criminal wrongdoing,” Gowdy said. “I want you to tell me: What criminal statutes you have evaluated?”
“I have not looked at any,” the IRS commissioner admitted.
“Well then how can you possibly tell our fellow citizens that there is no criminal wrongdoing if you don’t even know what statutes to look at?” Gowdy followed-up.
“Because I’ve seen no evidence that anyone consciously –”
“Well how would you know what elements of the crime existed? You don’t even know what statutes are in play,” Gowdy said, visibly annoyed. “I’m going to ask you again: What statutes have you evaluated?”
“Uh,” the IRS commissioner stumbled, “I think you can rely on common sense–”
“Common sense? Instead of the criminal code, you want to rely on common sense? No, Mr. Koskinen, you can shake your head all you want to, commissioner. You have said today that there’s no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and I’m asking you what criminal statutes you have reviewed to reach that conclusion.”
“I reviewed no criminal statutes,” said the IRS commissioner.
You can watch the testimony here:
by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
Even though the IRS claims it lost all of Lerner’s emails due to a hard drive crash, as least some of those appear at some point to have been archived (the ones from 2009): As reported,
“House congressional investigators have requested emails from 2009 to 2011, when the IRS division led by Lerner began targeting for extra scrutiny Tea Party and other conservative nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status.
The IRS had a contract with email-achiever Sonasoft in effect at least through 2009, according to the website FedSpending.org.
That same year, the company tweeted: “The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
And a document on the company website suggests its system “archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content.”
However, whether Sonasoft’s government contract extended through 2011 or if the company had the capacity to save every email from such a large agency remains unclear.”
The saga continues.
by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
In sworn testimony this morning (Friday, June 20th) IRS Commissioner John Koskinen stated that Obama was told about Lerner’s emails in April. This would be 6 weeks before Congress was told.
“The IRS knew in February, or maybe even in March, and Treasury and the White House knew at least in April — but Congress and the American people didn’t find out until June.”
Congress received a letter from the White House on Wednesday informing them they knew about the emails in April, having been informed by the Treasury Department. IRS head, Koskinen, stated he had seen the letter as well.
“He said his “understanding” is that someone in the IRS general counsel’s office informed someone in the Treasury Department’s general counsel office “that there was an issue and the IRS was investigating.”
And yet, in March “Mr. Koskinen told the House Oversight Committee in March, “if you want them all, we’ll give them all to you, though he added that doing so might take years”.
This is worse than Watergate, indeed.
by | BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
Now we’ve gone from yes, we have emails —> no we don’t have emails because of a computer crash —-> the hard drive may have been recycled. Politico reports:
“Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.
What’s more, “On Wednesday, the White House retorted that for the time frame in which Lerner’s emails are missing, there are no direct communications between 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the now-retired Lerner.
Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes, including the former chief of staff for the acting IRS commissioner”
The WSJ calls this IRS Scandal “worse than Watergate“. ““The Watergate break-in was the professionals of the party in power going after the party professionals of the party out of power. The IRS scandal is the party in power going after the most average Americans imaginable”
At this point, I’m inclined to agree.
by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
We now know that the state of affairs within the VA system was abhorrent for years — and that Obama, like his predecessor, knew there were problems. And yet, several well known left-leaning columnists spoke highly about the VA health system anyway, especially ramping up the rhetoric right at the time Obamacare began to take shape in Congress in 2009.
Obama’s objectives regarding the VA were laid out in the Obama Transition Plan for when he took office. Obama had been warned about the problems in 2008, so he stated that he wanted to “make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible”.
Therefore, shortly after his inauguration, Obama spoke to Congress in February 2009 to discuss healthcare reform, and the process toward the Affordable Care Act (ACA) began.
At the same time in 2009, both Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman of the NY Times and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post heaped praised the VA system. They must have read Obama’s VA talking points:.
Kristof: It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
Paul Krugman: Let’s talk about health care around the advanced world…. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.”
Klein: The “VA is actually socialized medicine, where the government owns the hospitals and employs the doctors. If you ordered America’s different health systems worst-functioning to best, it would look like this: individual insurance market, employer-based insurance market, Medicare, Veterans Health Administration”.
It is clear that these writers never had any information, nor had they done any research on the VA, the quality of its services, or its financial and operational efficiency. They write what they wish to be as if it were fact, hoping that their readers won’t find them out. You are certainly free to wonder about the credibility and integrity of their other writings.
The ACA began to be debated seriously during the fall of 2009 and it passed on March 25, 2010. It was during this same time that the secret waiting lists were developed at many VA centers. In the midwest alone, ten facilities have been found with the secret waitings lists, along with the most widely known problem in Arizona. These were clearly not “rogue” employees but signal part of a wider, concerted effort to keep issues quiet.
How did this happen? At least one attempt to fix the problem never got off the ground after nearly a decade of trying.
Apparently a medical scheduling project for the VA was begun in 2000 and was discontinued in 2009, 9 years after it the project began — and it remained utterly unfinished. Nothing seems to have been done for another 3 years until 2012, when the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs launched a contest to create an app for scheduling — a contest which didn’t close until the summer of 2013.
According to a press release in 2013 announcing the winners in the “scheduling app” contest, it was noted that the “VA started to develop a Medical Scheduling Package replacement in 2000. This effort was not successful. When VA ended the project in 2009, none of the planned capabilities were delivered. It had cost more than $127 million”.
And was used at the VA between the end of the Medical Scheduling Package project in 2009 and the Medical Scheduling App Contest of 2012/2013?
We now know there were secret waiting lists as some of the facilities. It also appears the the Obama Administration knew about the “secret waiting lists” as early as 2010. The Daily Caller reports that there was an internal VA investigation in 2010 regarding “paper” waiting lists:
“We conducted this review to determine the validity of an allegation that senior officials in Veterans Integrated Service Network 20 (VISN) instructed employees at the Portland VA Medical Center to use unauthorized wait lists to hide access and scheduling problems,” according to an August 17, 2010 VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report entitled “Review of Alleged Use of Unauthorized Wait Lists at the Portland VA Medical Center”
So, while the merits of the ACA was being debated, the VA’s scheduling system was scrapped, wasting $127 million. $127 million is a lot of taxpayer monies that could have been used on veterans’ treatments over the years.
But who was talking about it? No one. Certainly not the most widely read papers in this country.
Instead, we got reassurances from the press to a nervous public about the government’s ability to overesee healthcare, especially after the ACA passed in a controversial way. What’s more, the VA continued to be offered as a model even when the backlash to the law began.
In 2011, Paul Krugman of the NYT happily explained how successful the VA system: “The V.H.A. is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform. Many people still have an image of veterans’ health care based on the terrible state of the system two decades ago.”
Now we find out that it was clearly not working.
Underfunding the Department of Veterans Affairs is not the problem. From 2007 to 2012, enrollment in VA services has increased by 13% from 2007 to 2012. At the same time, the VA budget went from $82 million to $125 million — a 53% increase, and the biggest jump in the VA’s budget history since records go back to 1940. Yet the VA could not deliver quality services to our Veterans.
Government should not be handling our health systems. The fact that secret waiting lists existed shows just how far the government went to hide its incompetence in running a health system at the very time that Obamacare was being debated both in Congress and then in the public square. And the media supported the narrative that government delivered quality and efficient health care to our Veterans without checking to see if it was actually true.
If Congress and Americans knew the truth of the condition of the VA health system, it is quite possible that Obamacare would never have been allowed to become law.
by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
Do you know who is on the hook for many student loans? You, the taxpayer.
From CNS News:
“Since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the cumulative outstanding balance on federal direct student loans has jumped 517.4 percent.
The balance owed as of the end of May was $739,641,000,000.00. That is an increase of $619,838,000,000.00 from the balance that was owed as of the end of January 2009, when it was $119,803,000,000.00, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement”
The largest reason for this is Obama’s “Pay As You Earn” (PAYE) program implemented in 2010.
There are several portions of PAYE that are particularly concerning:
1) PAYE repayment is based on 10% of discretionary income;
2) If the payment doesn’t cover the accruing interest, the government pays your unpaid accruing interested for up to three years from when you begin paying back your loan under the PAYE program.
3) The balance of your loan can be forgiven after 20 years if you meet certain criteria
4) Your loan can be forgiven after 10 years if you go to work for a public service organization
Think the debt balloon is bad now? The program will be severely unsustainable once loans start to be repaid — with interest often being covered by the federal government– and later, loan forgiveness options kick in, with the balance paid by the federal government.
And the federal government is…YOU.
More on how the PAYE program hurts the economy:
by | ARTICLES, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, OBAMACARE
Did a failed medical scheduling project at the VA contribute to the development of “secret waiting lists”?
At least one attempt to implement a scheduling system at the VA never got off the ground after nearly a decade of trying.
Apparently a medical scheduling project for the VA was begun in 2000 and was discontinued in 2009, 9 years after it the project began — and it remained utterly unfinished. Nothing seems to have been done for another 3 years until 2012, when the Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs launched a contest to create an app for scheduling — a contest which didn’t close until the summer of 2013. Was it during this interim time between scheduling systems that the practice of “secret lists” began as a coverup/bandaid for the problem?
According to a press release in 2013 announcing the winners in the “scheduling app” contest, it was noted that the “VA started to develop a Medical Scheduling Package replacement in 2000. This effort was not successful. When VA ended the project in 2009, none of the planned capabilities were delivered. It had cost more than $127 million”.
So, was used at the VA between the end of the Medical Scheduling Package project in 2009 and the Medical Scheduling App Contest of 2012/2013?
We now know there were secret waiting lists as some of the facilities. It also appears the the Obama Administration knew about the “secret waiting lists” as early as 2010. The Daily Caller reports that there was an internal VA investigation in 2010 regarding “paper” waiting lists:
“We conducted this review to determine the validity of an allegation that senior officials in Veterans Integrated Service Network 20 (VISN) instructed employees at the Portland VA Medical Center to use unauthorized wait lists to hide access and scheduling problems,” according to an August 17, 2010 VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report entitled “Review of Alleged Use of Unauthorized Wait Lists at the Portland VA Medical Center”
Underfunding the Department of Veterans Affairs is not the problem. From 2007 to 2012, enrollment in VA services has increased by 13% from 2007 to 2012. At the same time, the VA budget went from $82 million to $125 million — a 53% increase, and the biggest jump in the VA’s budget history since records go back to 1940. The failed Medical Scheduling Package project alone cost $127 million dollars.
$127 million is a lot of taxpayer monies that could have been used on veterans’ treatments. Yet even with a generous budget, the VA could not deliver quality services to our Veterans.
by | BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, TAXES
I joined the Tea Party in my locality when it began because I sincerely believed in its simple, but extremely powerful and direct message:
Low Taxes
Limited, Constitutional Government
Individual liberty
and nothing else. The Tea Party was not to be a political “Party” with positions on every subject under the sun. It would only be involved in its particular concerns, so as not to dilute its message.
Then what is this nonsense regarding certain Tea Party groups espousing substantial anti-immigration rhetoric?
How can someone espousing limited government, individual liberty, and rule of law be FOR crony capital government-imposed restrictions on businesses hiring who they want?
And with that, a large reason for such a high number of “illegal” immigrants is because the government has created arbitrary, low quotas which limit the amount of foreign-born workers allowed — though many sectors of our economy demand more.
The current Tea Party was galvanized by the original (Boston) Tea Party and share a same disdain over high and unjust taxation. But the original “tea partiers” would be turning over in their graves by being associated with the current Tea Party’s anti immigration stance!
Our colonists came to America for a variety of reasons ranging from freedom of religion to economic opportunity and wealth. They sought hope, prosperity, and freedom. They were the original immigrants.
America is a unique country because men, women, and children from other countries all want to come here. Unless you have a relationship to a US citizen or a permanent resident, the only way to be able to come here is through a job by being a skilled laborer or professional. This is a good thing.
We are getting the creme de la creme from other countries — and we want to say no to them? Here we have people who work and are motivated enough to uproot and better themselves by living in another country. That is the best kind of ethic we need to continue to nourish and aspire to America, the way we always have.
As for those who flee here from oppression: if their only crime is that they seek a better life, decent housing, food, and hygiene and they risk life and limb to come here, how can we turn that spirit away?
The current Tea Party would do well to remember that this country has survived and thrived precisely because of immigration; first, from the original colonists and second, from the wave of people who came here mainly during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
You are here because of an immigrant who believed in America. For the Tea Party to be closed-minded and protectionist on the issue of immigration flies in the face of the original Tea Partiers who inspired them.
