Fish Swim, Birds Fly, & Mary Jo Raises Taxes

Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy's campaign manager either announced an abrupt shift in Ms. Kilroy's politics this past Thursday or decided Kilroy's policies are so unpalatable to voters that he needed to mask them with a lie. Her campaign manager stated that the Congresswoman is opposed to the idea of a value-added tax and that she has developed an interest "in finding ways to cut taxes and get money back into the hands of the people who need it."

If this were more than election year rhetoric, it'd be shocking. Of course, it's not. Mary Jo Kilroy will always be a pro-tax, anti-growth politician. Throughout her life as a politician Ms. Kilroy has consistently raised taxes. It's what she does. Fish swim, birds fly, and Mary Jo Kilroy raises taxes. Sure as death and... taxes.

As a county commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy voted along party lines to double the sales tax. Five months later, after the county auditor had said the county was collecting more than enough in fees and taxes, Mary Jo Kilroy again voted along party lines to double the conveyance fee for all real estate sales in the county. To make matters worse, Kilroy's abuses of power as county commissioner cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

All told Mary Jo Kilroy raised taxes by more than $200,000,000 as a county commissioner. Apparently, by "get money back into the hands of the people who need it" her campaign manager meant the hands of an ever-expanding government.

Sadly, the $200,000,000 mountain of tax hikes Mary Jo Kilroy buried us under as a county commissioner looks like a molehill compared to the tax hikes she has approved as a congresswoman--and she's just getting started!

Congresswoman Kilroy voted FOR a tax hike with the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, declared by the Wall Street Journal as likely to be "the biggest tax in American history". Estimates have the costs reaching as high as $161,000,000,000 in 2020--that's $1,870 vacuumed right out of a family of four's grocery budget. Even liberal Democratic "Dean of the House" Rep. John Dingell cautioned that the bill Congresswoman Kilroy supported is "a great big" tax.

Congresswoman Kilroy voted FOR a tax hike with Obamacare, the healthcare overhaul which will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next ten years and will raise taxes by $569.2 billion. Additionally, it will hit an estimated 4 million households with further tax penalties for failing to afford insurance (the law mandates all citizens must purchase insurance). 

And it gets worse: A primary objective of the healthcare overhaul was to rein in costs. Despite Mary Jo Kilroy's Joe Isuzu logic that Obamacare could achieve that feat, a new report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Chief Actuary states the legislation will increase national healthcare spending by $311 billion. 

Job well done, Congresswoman. Thanks to Mary Jo Kilroy we all will have the pleasure of paying more for healthcare. What would we do without her?

For one, we'd pay a whole lot less in taxes. Between the $200,000,000 in tax hikes she brought us as county commissioner and the hundreds of billions she's brought us as a Member of Congress, Mary Jo Kilroy could easily fill a money bin and swim through it a la Scrooge McDuck. The difference, of course, is that when Scrooge McDuck does it he entertains children; when Mary Jo Kilroy does it she's saddling them with a deeper share of the national debt--$41,626 per citizen as of this posting.

 Kilroy making it rain--with your tax dollars!

If this is what it looks like when Congresswoman Kilroy is "finding ways to cut taxes and get money back into the hands of the people who need it," God help us when she's out of election-year mode.

Obama Advisor: Throw the Country Into a VAT

Our country might be getting pushed into a VAT, the dreaded state of a tax on everything productive. At a New York Historical Society event yesterday Paul Volcker, Chair of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said that the United States should consider a European-style value-added tax (or VAT) to help tackle the soaring government budget deficit.

A value-added tax is basically a tax levied at every level of the manufacturing process on the amount of value added to the product by each additional producer. So if the end product is widgets, one producer is taxed for the “w,” the next producer is taxed for adding the “i,” another for the “d,” and then another, another, and another for the “g,” “e,” and “t,” respectively. And then, at the end of the production cycle, all these taxes are passed on to the end consumer--you, me, and everyone else. However, when a consumer buys goods in a VAT system the true depth of the value-added tax doesn’t show up on the receipt because the bulk of the tax has already been paid by producers.

It’s a particularly appealing tax to big-government politicians because, as Ronald Reagan put it back in 1985, “a value-added tax actually gives a government a chance to blindfold the people and grow in stature and size.” “The Great Communicator” went on to warn of the insidious nature of the tax: “[I]t’s hidden in the price of a product. And that tax can quietly be increased, and all the people know is that the price went up, and they don’t know whether the price went up because somebody got a raise, or whether the company wanted to increase profits, or whether it was government.”

So if the government imposes a VAT system on us, politicians will have a clandestine vehicle for raising taxes. (Yikes!) In a VAT, our economy will be damned to slow growth for decades and every manufacturer in the land will be trapped in a morass of paperwork and government bureaucracy. The European Union’s VAT laws are so complex they had to create an eLearning course to help their citizens and bureaucrats navigate the tax code.

And folks, the VAT isn’t replacing a current tax; it’s just more gasoline being poured onto the fire.

How did it come to this? What happened to the Obamacare deficit reduction? Congresswoman Kilroy promised we were going to spend a bunch of money we don’t have and, as the money rolled out, it would lower the deficit. Hard to believe that line of reasoning, but she said it would be so. The Democrats rolled out their “Mission Accomplished” banner and told us they had deflated the ballooning budget deficits. So why, then, do we need a value-added tax?

Apparently, we were lied to--and by those bastions of trustworthiness in Congress no less. The outrage! The shock! The… total predictability.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi hinted that this was phase II of the Obamacare plan back in October 2009 while appearing on the Charlie Rose program. “[European governments] get a tax off of [a value-added tax] and they use that money to pay the healthcare for their own workers… Somewhere along the way, a value-added tax plays into [American healthcare reform],” and then as an afterthought, “Of course, we want to take down the healthcare cost, that’s one part of it.”

So throwing the taxpayers into a VAT has been the plan all along, apparently. The Democrats certainly weren’t very forthcoming about that.

The new tax burden to pay for Obamacare doesn’t end there, unfortunately. Mr. Volcker also said that it may be necessary to develop a carbon or other energy-related tax.

Hopefully, when Obamacare kicks in it’ll cover backs broken by the tax burden.

Would anyone else rather have a Congress that adds value than a value-added tax? I know I would. Let’s toss the bums out!