Tuesday, March 24, 2009

New Taxes...Hooray!!!

During the recent campaign season, we heard a great deal about lower taxes for the middle class, tax cuts for 95% of the American people.

Then government spending ramped up like never before. So what gives? How can spending increase while taxes decrease?

The following excerpt is from the Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter, written by John Mauldin.

This week saw President Obama give us a budget with a projected deficit of $1.75 trillion dollars, and a massive tax increase on the "wealthy." But hidden in the details was an even larger tax increase on everyone. Obama wants to create a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions. This is expected to generate $79 billion in 2012, $237 billion by 2014, and grow to $646 billion by 2019. These will be payments by energy (primarily utility) companies to the government. That will cause utilities to have to raise the prices they charge customers for energy. Such a level of taxation is eventually 4-5% of total US GDP. That is not small potatoes. And since the wealthy do not use all that much more power than the rest of us, it will affect the lower incomes disproportionately.

It will take money out of consumers' pockets and transfer it to the government. You can call it cap-and-trade, but it is a tax. And a huge one. Anything that will take 4% of GDP away from consumer spending is not business friendly. And by driving the cost of energy up, it will drive high-energy-using businesses away from the US to developing countries where energy is cheaper. It will make it even harder
for people to save money and drive up costs for the elderly and retired. But it
will make the environmental lobby happy.


Expect more hidden taxes in the near future. There are consequences to big government spending!!


Questioning Politics