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by Jack Lee
As the facts about what was in the 150 page fiscal compromise bill becomes known,l voters who must pay for it are shocked and appalled!
The inclusion of so much pork amid a dramatic and sometimes raucous year-end debate over our debt makes you wonder if it wasn’t all just theatrics to fool the little people? It seems incredible that after decades of us little guys haranguing Congress over irresponsible pork spending that in the 11th hour of our financial faltering these these crooks in blue suits, have the audacity to stick it to us again?
The obvious conclusion to be reached here is a majority of those serving in Washington are irredeemably corrupt or incompetent! How else can you explain their conduct? That reminds me, didn’t Obama make a promise that his administration was going to be pork free? Yeah, he said that, but if he had said free pork, he would have been more truthful. Well, that pork isn’t free…it’s costing us dearly every year and right when we’re at the edge of the fiscal cliff they pork us one more time! Wow, now that is audacious, even for Congress.
Under the pork plan the federal government would extend special tax credits for their most favored businesses. That’s worth about $200b in unrealized (lost) tax revenue, but at the same time they failed to cut an equal amount from other federal programs as an offset thus adding to, not decreasing, the deficit. How stupid is that?
Now the pork report:
•$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects. (CA also passed special interest bills for Hollywood)
•$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50 percent of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease. (CA passed a lot of railroad pork, mostly for the high speed rail to nowhere)
•$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.
•$70 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”
•$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.
•$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes. (This goes mostly to CA where electric vehicles is a green boondoggle mandated by CA state government)
Kudos go to the House GOP lawmakers gave for not addressing the $60b disaster relief for “Sandy” was the pork written in by their sellout Republicans in the Senate. Check out this pork: $56.8 million for charting the debris from last year’s Japanese tsunami? Tracking ocean flotsam (junk) costs $56 million? $41 million for eight military bases including Guantanamo Bay; this has absolutely nothing to do with Sandy! Or how about the $5.3B to the Army Corps of Engineers, that is more than their annual budget. $100 million for the federal Head Start day care program – yes, I said day care, it’s in there too. Then there was the $188 million for new Amtrak lines. This is not for repairs, it’s for new track! There’s more, much more but I think you get the picture and this why lawmakers wanted to pass on it until the next Congress could be seated. I don’t blame them for passing over this so-called relief bill, especially considering the lousy Fiscal Cliff Bill they just passed. Both of these bills coming at once would have surely caused riotous repercussions for them back in their home districts.
If our illustrious elected officials feel the need to spend millions/billions on all these “important” pork programs, perhaps they should be dipping into their OWN pockets instead of spending taxpayer $$ that we cannot afford!
Geez. Haven’t your been reading about that algae thing? There is absolutely no environmental downside, except the amount of acreage involved. It’s got serious potential. It could save us from fracking, which will render vast swaths of acreage uninhabitable, no gardening, no drinking water … not diddly.
Now, the NASCAR deal … any number of NASCAR executives should go to jail for that. And this is what I was talking about with the “corporate” thing. I mean, NASCAR employs people, but this … this is just us taxpayers funding investor profit. The investors can fund the tracks themselves, and forego present profit for future profit. Ain’t that how it’s supposed to work? How come we have to pony up?
The algae … that’s uncharted territory, but promising, and what we … forward thinking taxpayers that we are … are willing to explore.
Algea has been around for decades what’s the holdup?
Your view on fracking is total progressive mythology…the scarey boogeyman type.
As for NASCAR, I agree except its the politicians that deserve jail. Citizens have a right to petition government. Politicians have a fiduciary responsibility to the people and an oath of office to uphold. Corporatism and subsidy are born of political self-serving fecklessness. Unfortunately they can’t be jailed for serving the people poorly and they use these deals to buy votes.
A better solution might be to put the American people under psychiatric care for continuing to send them back again and again.
“Your view on fracking is total progressive mythology…the scarey boogeyman type.”
Yeah, tell that to the ranchers at the foot of the rockies who’ve already been driven off land where, now, nothing will grow!
“Citizens have a right to petition government.”
That has to be the quaintest description of bribery that I have ever heard.
In some cases it is bribery Libby but when it is the corporatism relationship has already been established…that requires collusion on the part of the politician who, as a representative of the people, has an moral obligation and a fiduciary responsibility that the corporate head does not have. The fact that YOU will not hold the politician responsible and accountable says a lot about the level of concern you actually have, which is none. You affiliate with the corrupt politician…you don’t want green energy to loose the ability to get those subsidies? You don’t want progressive democrats to use big corporation as a whipping post. You are just as immoral and irresponsible as they.
Disgusting!
Re: Fracking
the left will do anything to twist the truth. Fracking is the latest target that must be destroyed.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/03/NY-State-Hides-Report-Concluding-Fracking-is-Safe
Greens did what they always do…they made excuses and blamed the process. “The study wasn’t rigorous enough!” they cry…that translates to it didn’t produce the result we want. Progressives can’t think outside the box so they must find a way to make the world fit what they create in their little imaginative infantile brains.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/report-shale-fracking-not-to-blame-for-groundwater-pollution/
Okay but what about the surface destruction?
Problems bring innovation:
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/the-next-hot-cleantech-sector-clean-water-for-gas-fracking/
GE? Obama’s big corporate buddy? But he’s not the only one:
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678545/vereniums-plan-to-clean-up-the-fracking-industry-while-still-fracking
There are all kinds of entrepreneurs working on making this industry clean.
Gotta go…more later.
On a different, but related subject.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve said, “Businesses do NOT pay taxes, they collect them from the consumers.”
“Why Was a 2.3% ‘Medical Excise Tax’ Showing Up on Receipts from Sporting Goods Giant Cabela’s?:”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/why-was-a-2-3-medical-excise-tax-showing-up-on-receipts-from-sporting-goods-giant-cabelas/
It’s about time business starting punching back and letting people know who is costing them extra on the products they sell. That Cabela receipt clearly lets the consumer know that the prices went up to pay for the higher imposed costs associated with Obamacare.
Wouldn’t it be cool if all the taxes we pay accumulated as we shop, say inn the cloud, and at the end of the month we are sent a bill from a federal and a state agency that we have to pay by the end of the next month. The outrage over taxes would be like the fire works display in DC on the fourth of July!
Of course government wouldn’t do that because people wouldn’t pay, that’s why business has to collect, report and pay so many of the taxes we owe.
Now, there is one regulations I could endorse. We should be told just how much we are paying in taxes and what it’s going for. Set it up like the freedom for information that allowed that New York newspaper to publish every gun owner’s name and address. Wouldn’t we just all love to know what all of those taxes and mysterious deductions that appear on our phone bills is for? If we had been informed that we were paying for an illegal cell phone tax we could have corrected the wrong years ago.
We should demand that we have the right to be informed on how much we are paying and what it’s being used for.
I get a property tax bill/statement every year that has five separate bonds listed on it. Where is the rest of my money going? What is it going to support? Who’s salary is it paying for?
The same with my phone bill that lists six “Government Fees and Taxes” Two say they are taxes and four say they are “CA High Cost Fund A, High Cost Fund B and Advanced Svc Fund, Teleconnect Fund, Universal Lifeline Tel. Service Fund.” Oh wait. I’m looking at my bill and find these taxes/fees are listed twice with different amounts with separate totals that are not carried forward to the other. And in the second listing there are three additional taxes/fees. One for “Federal.” That’s all it says. This is totally unacceptable.
If a sporting goods store can program their registers to provide a list of the taxes and fees the customer is paying for so can all of the other businesses and agencies. I’d love to know just how much I’m paying out to taxes and fees. Since the very rich get to write off so much of what they pay, we should be able to too. But first we need to know what all of those hidden taxes are and what they are for.
You’re right too that businesses shouldn’t be the tax collectors for local, state and the feds. It’s costing them to provide this service to our governments for free. Collecting taxes should be done the same way Wisconsin stopped collecting union dues. The unions are now collecting their own dues from their members. Those members are now seeing just how much they’re having to write a check for and are being forced to deal directly with their unions.
Wouldn’t it be great to have those who are owed the tax/fee be responsible to collect it and those who owe it be responsible to pay it. Taking out the business as the middleman could provide a significant savings and potential lower cost. Since all local, state and federal agencies already have tax collection departments the system is already in place.
If our Congress gets anything done in the next four years I hope it will be tax reform. I’d love for those of us on the lower end of the income scale be able to take advantage of write-offs like the high-end earners do. But, to do that we need to know just how much we’re paying and for what.
America will fall of its own weight if our legislators don’t get serious about simplifying and cleaning up the tax and regulatory codes. In California and at the federal level the complexity of the system makes it difficult to manage, expensive to manage and EASY to use in corrupt fashion.
Right now if you received information about the taxes you pay it would take all year to read it, never mind understanding it…even attorneys can’t agree how to interpret the laws on the books. It is absolutely nuts.
We need representatives with the minimalists mind…house cleaners…people who can create order out of chaos.
Nice article, but who (Senators/Reps.) is responsible for putting them in there? I would like/ and others too,I’ll bet. So folks can write to the ones who added that garbage, so in an election year they can be voted out of office. Everyone talks about all this pork, but no names are ever put to them,which the people have the right to know.