Obamacare surprise of the day - billions of 1099s

As the Wicked Witch of the West said, we had to pass the bill to read the bill.

At HotAir:

"Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress."

And: "That means any time a business pays any one entity $600 or more in a year, they will have to create a 1099 to file with the IRS. That means that the businesses have to get all of the tax information for every vendor, provide separate accounting for every payee, and then send the forms to both the IRS and the payees at the end of every year — as the payees do the same with their vendors, and so on. Edwards puts the scope in context:

For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS. …

Private transactions are the core of a market economy, and the source of America’s growth and prosperity. Now the federal government is imposing a vast new web of red tape on perhaps billions of these growth-generating private exchanges."

Thursday stuff

The Most Depressing Toy Ever?

 

Video: Knife throwing mother of the 1950s.

 

'Rude Man' Beaten, Pelted With Pasta.

 

Where Star Wars meets bacon.  Sort of related: Cooking Some Bacon – The Machine Gun Method.

 

How to collect whale snot using an RC helicopter.

 

The physics/mathematics of rope.

 

Mixed messages?  Not to me.

 

The First and Only Emperor of the United States.

 

How not to attempt suicide.

 

A Very Brief History of the Pocket.

 

Cotton t-shirts with the toughness of body armor.

 

Insects Covered in Dew (Macro Photography).

 

This is Not a Spiral.

 

Smart Women Drink More.

 

Lake Peigneur (disappearing lake) History Channel footage.

 

The Great Sperm Race: The Most Extreme Race on Earth.  Loosely related: The most bizarre life story on Earth?

 

Quantum Mechanics Explains How Muscle Produces Force.

Clean air causes global warming?

At NPR: "If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times.

Pig in a blanket.

The sheep-pig hybrid.

Whale poo could aid climate, say Aussie scientists

"The research suggests that if whale numbers grow, their droppings could help marine plant life flourish, thereby improving the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide blamed for global warming."

May 20th - “Everybody Draw Mohammed” day

The first annual.

Wall Street Was Not Where The Economic Meltdown Began

At Legal Insurrection:  "The reality is that the economic meltdown began with federal government policies which kept interest rates artificially low and forced banks to abandon traditional lending practices in the name of home ownership for all."

Ramirez cartoon nails it

Author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel: an open letter to President Obama

For Jerusalem.

Navy Access to Fox News Web Site Blocked

MSNBC.com and CNN.com still available.

"When members tried to go to FoxNews.com, the following message appeared: "Access to this site has been denied in accordance with Navy policy to safeguard the security posture and/or to maintain the operational integrity of the NMCI.""

Library of Congress to Archive Every Tweet Ever Tweeted

AP: Library of Congress to preserve Twitter posts.

Tax thoughts

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.  

~George Bernard Shaw
  

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.

~Robert A. Heinlein

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
~James Madison

The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away.
~John S. Coleman

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay.
~Milton Friedman

There is no such thing as a good tax.
~Winston Churchill

To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.
~Benjamin Tucker

The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
~Will Rogers

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
~Winston Churchill

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.
~Calvin Coolidge

It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income.
~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
~Thomas Paine

New York Times poll finds Tea Party members wealthier and better educated than general public

New York Times poll finds Tea Party members wealthier and better educated than general public.

Obama administration hands down rule limiting contract bidding to union shops

It’s official — federal agencies can now require that contractors be unionized to bid on large federal construction projects.

UK Telegraph: 10 reasons why Obama is the most naïve president in US history

Despite some strong competition from Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, President Obama has spectacularly blown the opposition out of the water, on almost every level, from appeasing America’s enemies abroad to building the foundations of a European-style welfare state at home. The end result is an America that is weaker, more vulnerable to attack, and mired in mountains of debt. No other president in US history has done more to undermine the original vision of America’s Founding Fathers, while replacing it with a reckless and risky agenda that threatens America’s ability to lead the free world.

You Dropped Food on the Floor. Do You Eat It?

A decision tree.  Via SFWeekly.

Jonah Goldberg - If We Become Europe, Who Will Be America?

Look at it this way. My seven-year-old daughter has a great lifestyle. She has all of her clothes and food bought for her. She goes on great vacations. She has plenty of leisure time. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t look at her and feel envious of how good she’s got it compared to me. But here’s the problem: If I decide to live like her, who’s going to take my place?

Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.

Dr. Zero - For the Love of Capitalism

Another must read.  "Socialism always seems to have a marketing advantage over capitalism.  This is not surprising, because socialism is a deeply romantic notion: a dangerously seductive dream of prosperity as a function of justice, where the wise redistribute the profits of the wicked to care for the needy.  Socialism’s promises are so alluring that questions about its poor performance are dismissed as rude.  It is a childish philosophy, and like any errant child, it receives a limitless supply of forgiveness and second chances."

Deepak Chopra Blames Own Meditation for Baja Quake

The U.S. Geological Survey is blaming day-to-day seismological changes for Sunday's 7.2 earthquake along the U.S.-Mexico border. But Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine practitioner and transcendental meditation guru, is pretty sure he knows what really happened.

"Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California," Chopra wrote to his Twitter followers shortly after the quake.

And then, to clarify: "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake," he tweeted. "Sorry about that."

IRS chief: Buy health insurance or lose your tax refund

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Unions looking for taxpayer help to payout expensive pensions

Legislation introduced last week could shift costs of union pension plans to taxpayers in an attempt to stave off organized labor’s pension funding crisis.

Smart Women Drink More

The report concludes: "The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns. 

"The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption."

WSJ: The VAT is Coming

So we are to have a European-style value-added tax (VAT). That's the emerging consensus in Washington as people come to recognize the reality of the deep financial hole into which the Obama administration has dug us. 

The Congressional Budget Office reckons we will be Greece by the end of the decade, owing the world—mostly the Chinese—a sum equal to 90% of our gross domestic product.

Fake story meant to ensnare bloggers catches NYT instead

At Libertypundits.net: "The basic idea was this: A bunch of law bloggers would try to punk the political bloggers, whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it. Fact checking hasn’t always been the strong suit of this community.

But the political bloggers, to their collective credit, didn’t bite, despite wide dissemination of the story. Not on the right or the left. Instead it was the vaunted New York Times that ran with the story without bothering to check its facts. The Times, of course, had no sense of humor about it when the angry phone call came to me a couple of hours later."

Dr. Zero - The Principle of Repeal

"Declaring repeal to be “impossible” is a self-fulfilling prophecy of American decline. A slapdash pile of graft and fraudulent cost projections, passed by a fantastically corrupt Congress that claims it couldn’t hear the muffled screams of the outraged electorate through the thick doors of their smoke-filled rooms, instantly becomes an eternal component of our lives? That will only be true if we make it true… and even then, it won’t be true for long. 

One way or another, ObamaCare won’t last far beyond the point where your kids go bankrupt trying to pay for it. The American entitlement state is the world’s tallest, shakiest house of cards. We can find the strength and self-respect to repeal this garbage now, or weep in shame and confusion when it implodes, after years of increasing poverty and decreasing public health. I encourage wobbly Republican politicians to take a long look at their preschool-age children, grandchildren, nephews, or nieces during the Easter holiday. Make peace with ObamaCare now, and you give life to a system that has already declared war on those kids… and will utterly defeat them before they graduate high school."

Chicago Law Prof on Obama: “Professors Hated Him because he was Lazy, Unqualified & Never Attended any of the Faculty Meetings”

via Gateway Pundit:

The highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law spoke out on Barack Obama saying, “Professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings.”

Doug Ross reported this and more:

I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct.

The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

Top 100 April Fools Pranks and Gadgets.

Top 100 April Fools Pranks and Gadgets.

Congressman: If Guam gets too overpopulated, it might tip over

This is the man who beat Cynthia McKinney in the 2006 Democratic primary - they certainly seem to elect whackjobs in that district.