Remember Obama’s tax on tanning salons? It includes some gym memberships, too. A Falls Church, VA gym posted this notice to their members. Some membership fees were going up. Why? Because those memberships included access to tanning machines.
“Some people who are members of the health club Planet Fitness are finding their membership costs have gone up because of [ObamaCare]…A sign posted at a Falls Church, Va. location says ‘Holders of Black Card memberships will be required to pay a tax on these memberships Starting January 1, 2014 as required by the implementation of provisions of [ObamaCare]…This is not a change in your membership fee but rather a tax required by the government. The reason these accounts are forced to charge the new tax is because they include the option for members to tan at the clubs. Obamacare has a tax on tanning salons. It doesn’t matter if the member uses or does not use the tanning facilities.” — FOXNews.
Obamacare taxes, oh, excuse me, user fees, are everywhere and are insidious.
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Remember Obama, yesterday, declaring another one-year delay on employer mandates for Obamacare? Well, there is a hitch. Businesses can only receive the delay if they declare to the IRS, on pain of perjury, that Obamacare had nothing to do with any layoffs or changes in employment.
Obama’s unlawful declaration forces businesses to lie and committee perjury if Obamacare’s costs forces them to layoff or change working conditions and still receive the mandate delay.
FIRMS MUST SWEAR OBAMACARE NOT A FACTOR IN FIRINGS
Is the latest delay of ObamaCare regulations politically motivated? Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so. — FOXNews.
The Wall Street Journal added this to Obama’s offer.
“Changing an unambiguous statutory mandate requires the approval of Congress, but then this President has often decided the law is whatever he says it is. His Administration’s cavalier notions about law enforcement are especially notable here for their bias for corporations over people. The White House has refused to suspend the individual insurance mandate, despite the harm caused to millions who are losing their previous coverage. Liberals say the law isn’t harming jobs or economic growth, but everything this White House does screams the opposite.” — WSJ.
Pure lawlessness.
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Boehner and Cantor are giving away the farm again. They say they will hold hostage the Debt Limit Increase if it doesn’t include a delay in the implementation of Obamacare and approval of the Keystone pipeline. They refuse to consider that Obama just declared a delay (with strings attached, see above,) and the Canadians are now shipping their oil to China. The impact of Keystone to the US economy is much less now than when it was proposed—and killed by Obama.
What will happen is that any provision added by the House will be removed by Reid when the bill arrives in the Senate. Then, Boehner and the House RINOs will rubber stamp the change. The debt limit will go up, no cuts in spending, no Keystone approval, and Obama agrees to delay Obamacare employer mandates for a year. Oh, yes, toss out that last one, Obama says he did that yesterday.
But the RINO leadership in the House should take heed of other House ‘Pubs. Some are fomenting revolt.
Conservatives revolt over lack of cuts
By Pete Kasperowicz, February 11, 2014, 09:09 am
Rank and file House Republicans opposed to their leadership’s debt limit plan are brainstorming new ways to limit federal spending.
Even as GOP leaders seem intent on pushing through a debt ceilng bill this week that doesn’t demand any new spending curbs, several conservative lawmakers are pressing for new ideas.
A few Republicans are hoping to to tie a debt ceiling increase to a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Late Monday, Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) proposed legislation that would require both the House and Senate to vote on a balanced budget amendment.
Crawford’s bill is an attempt to put limits on congressional spending habits that have pumped up the national debt to more than $17.2 trillion.
On the House floor Monday, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he could support tying a balanced budget amendment to the debt ceiling, but that it would have to cap spending at 18 percent of gross domestic product. King also said he wants a supermajority requirement for any new tax increases.
“This would get me to vote for a limited debt ceiling increase… a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution,” he said.
Dead Souls In the Republican Leadership
By John T. Bennett, February 11, 2014
“America cannot become the world and still be America.”
So warned the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in his 2004 article “America’s Dead Souls.” Huntington’s article was prophetic, and it explains why some GOP pols have taken the side of big business and illegal immigrants over the interests of our nation.
“In a variety of ways, the American establishment, governmental and private, has become increasingly divorced from the American people,” Huntington wrote.
Huntington’s core point was that the American elite has grown extremely distant — socially, economically, morally, and politically — from the public. This trend, he warned, undermines our democracy and harms the interests of the majority.
Huntington wrote that the American majority is concerned with “societal security,” meaning sustaining “existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity.” Elites, however, placed societal security behind “supporting international trade and migration” and “encouraging minority identities and cultures at home.”
The framework laid out in “America’s Dead Souls” is crucial to understanding how to respond to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
You can finish the column at the website.
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A parting note. Shirley Temple died today at age 85. Too many today have never seen any of the movies she made as a child star between 1934 through 1938. Shirley continued to act for a few years more but ‘retired’ at age 22. She married, raised a family and later in life became the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
She was one of a few child stars who wasn’t ruined by their popularity.