[VIDEO] Everybody Has To Pay This New Obamacare Tax

All Americans who bought health insurance policies this year – not just those enrolled in Obamacare – face a 41 percent increase in excise taxes because of hidden fees contained in an obscure section of the Affordable Care Act, according to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Virtually everyone who pays for health care insurance this year will be affected by the tax. The little-known tax was imposed on all consumers regardless of whether they obtained their insurance through Obamacare or through their employer or as individuals in the private market.

This year the tax will cost individuals more than $500 in extra premiums according to one actuarial estimate. Families who purchased insurance will see their premiums go up by more than $700.

The new tax also hits senior citizens who rely on Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage. It will land on the nation’s poor who depend upon Medicaid-managed care programs.

The 41 percent sticker shock increase doesn’t stop in 2015, however. Over the next four years, the statutorily mandated Obamacare fees are expected to double again.

Over the next decade, consumers will pay more than $145 billion for the tax, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The levy will continue to go up each and every year into the future.

The tax was buried by congressional authors in section 9010 of the law and was envisioned as a way to raise future funds to pay for Obamacare.

The Obamacare fees were designed by the program’s authors to be delayed, kicking in only in 2014 at $8 billion and mushrooming into a $14.3 billion annual price tag on insurance policies by 2018.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso, who favors repeal of section 9010, said the tax “is another example of how the president’s health care law was designed so the most painful parts of the law kick in years later.”

CBO reported the fee was a “statutorily fixed” amount that must be collected each year from consumers, as opposed to a percentage rate.

The statute describes the levy is an “annual fee” but health-care economists say it has been commonly referred to as an excise tax.

The Joint Committee on Taxation said the Obamacare tax was “similar to an excise tax based on the sales price of health insurance contracts.”

Via: Daily Caller

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Record 93,770,000 Americans Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Matches 38-Year Low

(CNSNews.com) - A record 93,770,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month, and the labor force participation rate remained at 62.6 percent, exactly where it was in June -- a 38-year low, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

In 1975, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping such records, 58,627,000 Americans were not in the labor force, and the number has grown steadily since then, breaking the 80-million mark at the end of George W. Bush's presidency; and the 90-million mark in July 2013, during Barack Obama's second term. The number of Americans not in the labor force has continued to rise since then.

According to the Congressional Budget Office's 2015 long-term outlook, the number of working Americans is expected to increase more slowly in coming decades, as more workers exit the labor force, many of them retiring baby-boomers; and fewer workers enter it -- given declining birth rates and a levelling-off of women in the labor force.

In July, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 250,876,000. Of those, 157,106,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 157,106,000 who participated in the labor force equaled only 62.6 percent of the 250,876,000 civilian noninstitutional population -- the same as it was in June. Not since October 1977, when the participation rate dropped to 62.4, has the percentage been this low.

Other notes from Friday's jobs report:

-- The economy added an estimated 215,000 jobs in July, in line with economists' expectations, but not enough to change the nation's civilian unemploymet rate, which remained at 5.3 percent.

-- Among the major demographic groups, the unemployment rate for adult men (4.8 percent), adult women (4.9 percent), whites (4.6 percent), blacks (9.1 percent), Asians (4.0 percent), and Hispanics(6.8 percent) showed little or no change.

-- 6,325,000  million people were employed part time for economic reasons (involuntary part-time workers) in July, These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part-time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

-- The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 2,180,000 in July (up from 2,121,000 in June). These individuals accounted for 26.9 percent of the unemployed.

Via: CNS News

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[VIDEO] CBO: Debt Headed to 103% of GDP; Level Seen Only in WWII; 'No Way to Predict Whether or When' Fiscal Crisis Might Occur Here

(CNSNews.com) - Testifying in the U.S Senate yesterday, Congressional Budget Office Director Keith Hall warned that the publicly held debt of the U.S. government, when measured as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, is headed toward a level the United States has seen only once in its history—at the end of World War II.

To simply contain the debt at the high historical level where it currently sits—74 percent of GDP--would require either significant increases in federal tax revenue or decreases in non-interest federal spending (or a combination of the two).

Historically, U.S. government debt as a percentage of GDP hit its peak in 1945 and 1946, when it was 104 percent and 106 percent of GDP respectively.

In 2015, the CBO estimates that the U.S. government debt will be 74 percent of GDP. That is higher than the 69-percent-of-GDP debt the U.S. government had in 1943—the second year after Pearl Harbor.

By 2039, CBO projects, the debt will increase to 101 percent of GDP and by 2040 to 103 percent GDP.

At that point, Hall told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the “debt would still be on an upward path relative to the size of the economy.”

While the run up in debt as a percentage of GDP in the 1940s financed a global war against Nazi Germany and Japan that ended with an allied victory, the current run toward unprecedented debt is based on projected increases in mandatory federal spending for entitlement programs. These include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies.

“Mainly because of the aging of the population and rising health care costs, the extended baseline projections show revenues that fall well short of spending over the long term, producing a substantial imbalance in the federal budget,” Hall said in his written testimony.

“As a result, budget deficits are projected to rise steadily and, by 2040, to raise federal debt held by the public to a percentage of GDP seen at only one previous time in U.S. history—the final year of World War II and the following year,” he said.

“Moreover,” he said, “debt would still be on an upward path relative to the size of the economy. Consequently, the policy changes needed to reduce debt to any given amount would become larger and larger over time. The rising debt could not be sustained indefinitely; the government’s creditors would eventually begin to doubt its ability to cut spending or raise revenues by enough to pay its debt obligations, forcing the government to pay much higher interest rates to borrow money.”

Eventually, the nation would face a crisis—with wary investors demanding “much higher interest” rates to buy U.S. government debt.

“How long the nation could sustain such growth in federal debt is impossible to predict with any confidence,’ testified Hall. “At some point, investors would begin to doubt the government’s willingness or ability to meet its debt obligations, requiring it to pay much higher interest costs in order to continue borrowing money.

Via: CNS News

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[VIDEO] Budget Office: US Debt Picture Has 'Worsened Dramatically'

Congress' budget office again warned that the U.S. faces a massive debt problem Tuesday, using stark language to describe the government's long-term mismatch between spending and revenues even as it slightly upgraded its projections for debt over the next 25 years.

"The long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically over the past several years, in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession and slow recovery," the Congressional Budget Office reported in its long-term budget outlook for 2015 released Tuesday.

RELATED: House defies veto threat, passes defense spending bill

The Budget Office, a nonpartisan in-house think tank for Congress, projected that the federal debt is set to rise from 74 percent of economic output today to 103 percent by 2040, driven by spending on government healthcare and retirement programs and interest payments on the debt.

The projection issued Tuesday, which is subject to significant uncertainty, is a slight improvement from last year, when the budget office estimated that debt would hit 106 percent by 2039. The outlook has gotten brighter, if only trivially, because financial markets now expect lower interest rates in the future, which will lower the cost of servicing the debt for the Treasury.

The budget office warned that debt would still be growing in 2040. It also could be nearly twice as large by 2040 as in the baseline estimate if a more realistic guess about how Congress will act in the years ahead and the economic feedback from higher debt placing a drag on economic growth are taken into account.

RELATED: Dems demand budget summit with GOP

Although the long-term budget picture is dark thanks to the anticipated costs of the Baby Boom generation retiring, the federal debt is anticipated to decline for the next few years, thanks partly to spending cuts and tax increases imposed by Congress in recent years.

But the larger development is the government dedicated more and more tax dollars to entitlement and healthcare programs.

Spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and other healthcare programs will rise from an average 6.5 percent of gross domestic product over the past 50 years to 14.2 percent of GDP by 2040.

Via: Washington Examiner

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ObamaCare: King v. Burwell -- More than Tax Credits

As the Obama administration nervously waits for a Supreme Court decision in King v. Burwell, there is another aspect to the case that has nothing to do with ObamaCare or tax subsidies. King v. Burwell tells the story of a president who overstepped the limits of his authority by unilaterally changing key provisions of the law without Congressional approval. It’s also a story of an administration’s repeated efforts to interfere in Congressional inquiries to determine whether IRS and Treasury officials were pressured into promulgating rules that are contrary to statutory text and favorable to the administration’s political objectives. 

The issues raised in King v. Burwell weren’t created in a vacuum -- they are the consequence of a poorly written law that was hastily passed through the reconciliation process. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of plaintiffs would be a strong rebuke for President Obama, who repeatedly altered key provisions of the law. Even if the Supreme Court rules against plaintiffs, the story does not end, for there are other rules that are also contrary to the plain language of the law.

Almost immediately after Obamacare was signed into law, the Obama administration began to eliminate, postpone, and alter key provisions without Congressional approval. The first to go was the CLASS Act, a provision that the Congressional Budget Office relied on to justify the cost of the law. Next were the SHOPs, which were supposed to level the playing field for small business owners by expanding their options to purchase affordable and quality healthcare plans for employees. Next, and with no prior warning, President Obama delayed implementation of the Employer Mandate, but he did not do the same for the Individual Mandate. Other provisions, including COOPs and the Navigator program, fell to the wayside.  

Once the rulemaking process began, some members of Congress became concerned that department officials were not interpreting the law’s plain meaning. When the IRS issued its proposed rule for the tax credits in 2011, it was met with strong opposition from Congressional members including Senator Orrin Hatch, then the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. Hatch questioned the legality of the proposed rule and in December 2011 sent a letter to the Department of the Treasury asking for all of the documents related to the development of the rule and the reasoning behind it. To date, the IRS and the Treasury Department have not responded to Hatch’s request. 
In September 2014, Darrell Issa, then Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, issued a Congressional subpoena to the IRS and Treasury requesting the same documents. The subpoena was ignored. After Issa moved to compel production of the documents, the Obama administration intervened and blocked the request. To date, no documents have been produced. 

Via: American Thinker

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Obamacare vs. Medicare

One of President Obama’s greatest political challenges has been hiding the fact that Obamacare is largely financed by siphoning huge sums of money out of Medicare. In particular, Obamacare cuts—or guts—Medicare Advantage, the popular program that allows seniors to get their Medicare benefits through private insurers. In fact, it’s only these Medicare Advantage cuts that allow the Congressional Budget Office to pretend that Obamacare won’t raise deficits—an implausible notion that polling indicates only a very small percentage of particularly credulous citizens believe.

BIGSTOCK

Late on Friday, February 21, in a 148-page, after-hours communication, the Obama administration declared that cuts to Medicare Advantage, long put off, will finally take effect in 2015. Predictably, and understandably, many conservatives responded by criticizing the announcement.

The cuts are bad in and of themselves, but cuts to the program have been a part of Obamacare’s written text from day one. So the real question is not whether Obamacare will cut Medicare Advantage; it’s whether the Obama administration—which doesn’t want those cuts to become evident when Medicare’s open-enrollment period begins on October 15, less than three weeks before Election Day—will take unilateral, lawless executive action to stop the cuts from taking place. That’s what has happened to date.

In the lead-up to Obama’s reelection, he and his administration weren’t satisfied with having mailed out full-color, taxpayer-funded propaganda brochures and run millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded TV ads featuring Andy Griffith, all touting Obamacare to seniors. They knew that such nonsense would quickly be exposed if Obamacare’s prescribed Medicare Advantage cuts were to take effect: Seniors would have started noticing those cuts on October 15, 2012.

Via: The Weekly Standard

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Fed Chairman Yellen backs CBO study on minimum wage job loss

Janet Yellen, the newly-installed head of the Federal Reserve System, isexercising her political independence (she cannot be fired during her five year term as Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors) and telling the truth about the new minimum wage proposed by President Obama.  Joseph Lawler reports in the Examiner:

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen lent credence Thursday to a Congressional Budget Office study of the minimum wage that White House economists had criticized for its finding that an increase favored by President Obama would cost 500,000 jobs.

In an unusual criticism of the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, Jason Furman, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, had responded to the CBO report by directly challenging its estimates of job losses, claiming that they "do not reflect the overall consensus view of economists."

Yellen, who held the same position Furman does under President Bill Clinton, disagreed with that assessment at a SenateBanking Committee hearing.

"CBO is as qualified as anyone to evaluate that literature," Yellen said in response to a question from Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev. "I wouldn’t want to argue with their assessment.”

This is refreshing indeed. Furman’s statement was shocking in its dishonesty. He was pandering to the president at whose pleasure he serves. The Democrats are ginning up a campaign issue and want to pretend that raising the price of something does not cause demand to shrink. That is dishonest.

Via: American Thinker

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Hey! Twenty three Democratic Senators can do minimum wage math!

Shocking. Why have they hidden their light under a bushel for all these years?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday delayed action on legislation raising the minimum wage, the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2014 agenda.

[snip]

Reid has not yet unified his caucus on the issue, which is a constant in the Democrats’ election-year playbook. Of the 55 senators who caucus with the Democrats, only 32 have signed on as official co-sponsors of Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) bill.

(H/T: Hot Air) The ostensible problem was a CBO (a org that the Left can never decide is good or bad these days) report promising that this measure would lose half a million jobs. But the real problem is that Democratic politicians have never been able to gently explain to their more activist members that business owners do not have Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold coins. I know that this sounds unbelievable, but trust me: many progressives really do think that prices are high simply because capitalists take ‘too much’ profits. That a business like, say, oil production could be seeing most of its revenues go out in overhead (ESPECIALLY taxes) seems to be absolutely alien to them, as a whole.

But you have to understand: many of the Left’s theoreticians lack critical educational or life experiences that would help them properly understand economics. Very few of them have owned a business, worked directly for a small business owner, and/or experienced what we in this country laughingly call ‘poverty.’ The closest most of them have come are a variety of retail jobs that were abandoned the moment something better came along – or, more likely, they got boring. Couple that with the usual lack of empathy* and you get this kind of failure to communicate.

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board! …Which is going to be a little bare on the Democrats’ side, given that it’s an election year, but such is life.

Via: Red State

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Sebelius: Administration Never Set 7 Million ACA Enrollment Goal – CBO Did

(CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday dismissed the goal of 7 million Obamacare enrollees by the end of March as something that the Congressional Budget Office made up.

 “First of all, 7 million was not the administration. That was a CBO Congressional Budget Office prediction when the bill was first signed. I’m not quite sure where they even got their numbers. Their number’s all over the board, and the vice president has looked and said it may be closer to 5 to 6,” Sebelius told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill.

Hill asked if she agreed with Vice President Joe Biden’s statement that 5.6 million Americans enrolled by the end of March would be a good start.

“We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that's a hell of a start," Biden admitted last week on his way to a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Minneapolis, according to a pool report of his meeting, Reuters reported.

Despite her insistence that the CBO made up the 7 million enrollees number, as CNSNews.com previously reported, Sebelius told NBC News on Sept. 30, 2013, that "success," in her opinion, would be having 7 million Americans enrolled in the Obamacare exchanges by the end of March.

"I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014," Sebelius told NBC's Nancy Snyderman.

Meanwhile, the CBO predicted in May 2013 that by 2023, the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of uninsured by 25 million, “leaving 31 million uninsured.”

“In our current projections for 2023, the ACA reduces the number of people without health insurance by 25 million, leaving 31 million uninsured (compared with 30 million in our February estimate),” the CBO reported.

Via: CNS News

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