IRS chief: Buy health insurance or lose your tax refund | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

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.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » What’s taking the CBO so long for its analysis? Update: $940 billion?.

You see, they chose that number because it puts it just under the TRILLION dollar(s) figure that we know will be scored by the CBO..

I didn’t get a chance to post this, but out of the all the crap spewed by NoBama yesterday, this was the most honest portion:

Obama on Slaughter strategy: “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the … rules are”; Update: “Combative” video added

Ignore the Sham Budget

The real action will have to be next year, after the mid-term elections. But even then, it’s not clear whether our political system can deal with the crisis of deficits and debt, or whether it will take our foreign creditors, on whose lending we are totally hooked, to administer the shock we need to get our financial foundation on a sound footing. I suspect the latter. They wouldn’t have to do much, just a few public pronouncements in Beijing that China’s central bank plans to invest excess reserves in a different way than it did in the past. In other words, there would not have to be withdrawals of foreign investments, just no increases to feed our ever-growing needs, to induce widespread panic in the markets and in Washington.

If I suspended my instincts about how the crisis would ultimately be resolved, and make an assumption that our political system could rise to the occasion—an assumption of historic proportions—what would Washington have to do?

When you are finished reading that link, go to this NYT article about the ‘Volcker Rule’..another must read

“I think it’s confused the issue considerably, because he’s basically fanned the fires of populism and in a lot of instances, populism doesn’t give you either good regulatory activity or strong markets.”

In Ohio, Obama vows to ‘never stop fighting’

PAPER: Obama's fortunes set to deteriorate further...
Bernanke under pressure; Faltering support for Fed chief...
Dow Suffers Worst Week SInce Last March...
Obama seen as anti-business by 77% of investors...
Europe welcomes bank plan, won't imitate it...
White House nightmare persists...

RASMUSSEN:
Obama Approval Index: -19
Strongly Approve 24%
Strongly Disapprove 43%
Total Approval 44%

President Barack Obama signaled to House Democratic leaders Wednesday that they’ll have to drop their opposition to taxing high-end health insurance plans to pay for health coverage for millions of uninsured Americans.

In a meeting at the White House, Obama expressed his preference for the insurance tax contained in the Senate’s health overhaul bill, but largely opposed by House Democrats and organized labor, Democratic aides said. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was private.

House Democrats want to raise income taxes on high-income individuals instead and are reluctant to abandon that approach, while recognizing that they will have to bend on that and other issues so that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., can maintain his fragile 60-vote majority support for the bill.

AP sources: Obama OKs taxing high-end health plans – Yahoo! News.

via Reid: I’m So Totally Stoked My Health Care Reform Bill Will “Save” $127 Billion Over Ten Years, Which Is Less than October’s One Month Deficit.

2074 Pages… And senators will have a full three days to read it before voting.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Reid: Those tonsil vultures stole my vote.

Reid brought the bill to the floor in an effort to secure the support of doctors groups such as the American Medical Association (AMA) for the future fight over an overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system.

Reid’s gambit, however, backfired, leaving Reid blaming the AMA for failing to secure GOP votes and the AMA retorting that the leader misinterpreted its pledge.

Reid told colleagues that the AMA said it could deliver 27 Republican votes for the legislation, according to two Senate Democratic lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some Democrats wondered whether it was reasonable to expect that as many as 27 Republicans would support a 10-year freeze in light of the fact that only 17 Senate Republicans voted for a one-year freeze last July. Of that group, only 11 remain in the Senate.

Joe Gandelman has an excellent roundup on this topic

–Ed Morrissey:

Winners take responsibility, while losers look for scapegoats. Last I looked, the AMA doesn’t have any leadership role in the Senate. They don’t “deliver” votes, and it’s not their role anyway. Perhaps a real Senate Majority Leader would have enough pull to count his own votes and make his own case, rather than leave that to a lobbying group and then get shocked, shocked to discover that most Republicans would not allow Reid to play his shell game with $250 billion that should get counted in the full ObamaCare proposal instead of hidden from the CBO.

Besides, let’s not forget that Reid has 60 Democrats in the Senate. Why should the AMA have to deliver any Republican votes? Reid can’t even deliver his own caucus. The cloture vote wasn’t even close at 47-53, which means that a number of Democrats defied Reid and rejected the shell game, too. Reid can sob all he wants about Tonsil Vultures, but the problem is that Reid is pushing legislation so radical and dishonest that he can’t deliver his own caucus.

–McQ:

Vote counting is a tried and true art within legislative bodies and any competent leader would pretty much know what to expect before ever putting a bill or amendment up for a vote. In fact, Reid missed by 27 – just on the Republican side.

Apparently he wasn’t aware of the 13 Democrats who were going to vote against it as well. That’s 40 no votes in a body of 60. That’s a pretty big miss.

Then he whines about things being run by a minority – a game he was more than happy to play when he was the Minority leader.

Harry Reid – incompetent (not that I’m complaining, mind you – just pointing it out), and the opposition’s best friend.

–My DD’s Charles Lemos:

How is it that the nation is being held hostage by a caucus of forty?

Nor is it terribly reassuring that the Majority Leader can’t keep his own caucus in line. A dozen Democrats and one independent crossed party lines and voted with the Republicans on the 53 to 47 roll call. The Democrats who voted against the party leadership were Senators Evan Bayh of Indiana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Bryon Dorgan of North Dakota, Jon Tester of Montana, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bill Nelson of Florida, Mark Warner of Virginia, Jim Webb of Virginia, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ron Wyden of Oregon. Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut also joined the GOP in defeating the measure.

Still it is more concerning that the Democrats are being outwitted tactically by Senator Mitch McConnell.

This news won’t help the Democrats’ efforts:

Also, career government economists within the Department of Health and Human Services dealt a blow to the House bill Wednesday, releasing a report concluding national health care spending would increase because newly insured people would seek care.

Unlike the analyses produced by the Congressional Budget Office, which looked at the impact of legislation on the federal government alone, the HHS report examined the impact on the national economy. The report complicates President Barack Obama’s pledge to sign a bill only if it slows the rate of health care spending.

After Stimulus: 49 of 50 States Have Fewer Jobs!
*6 Million Jobs Shy of Administrations' Projections...
Obama trying to boost party money, morale...
RNC Beats DNC in Money Race...
Dems lock Republicans out of committee room: 'They don't know how to behave'...
HealthCare Propaganda On Govt. Website?
House Dems Want Medicare for Everyone...
Administration plans big pay cuts at bailout firms...
Salaries of top executives by 90%...

WHITE HOUSE MASTER TO SLASH EXEC PAY

Michelle Malkin » Stimulapalooza: 3.6 Million Jobs Lost is “Quite Positive;” Update: Errors galore.

Gaffes in federal reports this week about stimulus have called into question the government’s ability to accurately track how many jobs are being created by the massive $787 billion Recovery Act.

The data in Thursday’s reports were filled with mistakes, including an error that made it look like a French vaccine maker received the largest stimulus contract, $1.4 billion, when in fact it has gotten an award one-100th the size.

Government research organization OMB Watch said its assessment of the reports revealed many inconsistencies in the job data.

“The data is rife with mistakes,” said Craig Jennings, senior federal fiscal policy analyst at OMB Watch. “When you put out data that hasn’t yet been checked, it undermines transparency, because you are putting out wrong information.”

…A mistake in the very first contract listed on the site prompted doubts about the reliability of the reports.

Recovery.gov erroneously reported Thursday that French vaccine maker Sanofi Pasteur had received $1.4 billion in stimulus funds from the Department of Health and Human Services. The company topped the site’s list titled “Largest federal contracts in U.S.”

When CNNMoney.com first asked about the contract Thursday, a spokeswoman from Sanofi Pasteur suspected the $1.4 billion figure was a mistake. HHS spokeswoman Vicki Rivas-Vazquez said the number on recovery.gov was erroneous and the actual amount was $10.4 million.

Sanofi Pasteur said Friday that $10.4 million is the correct figure.

“We anticipated errors in the reporting and so informed many reporters beforehand,” said Edward Pound, spokesman for the Recovery Board. “This is the first time this kind of reporting is being done. These reports are being reviewed by federal agencies and recipients to catch any errors or problems.”

The Recovery Board has the tall task of compiling all of the data, and is spending $18 million revamping its Web site to manage all of the information.

OMB Watch said its review yielded “really weird job numbers,” including many discrepancies within the reports themselves. For instance, Jennings said OMB Watch found that many companies said in a narrative portion of their reports that it was able to retain several employees because of stimulus funds, but the “jobs created” column read “zero.”

The Recovery Board aggregates its jobs data from the “jobs created” column to display the total number of jobs saved or created. Jennings speculated that recipients might have been confused about the scope of the term “created.”

“I would not stake any sort of claims on those job numbers,” said Jennings. “We don’t know what’s going on there.”

FY 2009 Federal Deficit Terrifyingly Huge

after reading the links within that link, this will make perfect sense:

That’s a little like resuscitating a guy who had a heart attack on the way to his execution. Yeah, he’s alive but for how much longer?

When confronted with something this unsustainable there’s only two things to be done.

1- Spend untold trillions more taking over the nation’s health insurance system.

and

2- Blame Bush.

Obama to conservatives: Grab a mop and help me clean up your mess

The good news: The “socialist mop” line made me laugh. The bad news: He’ll be telling us it’s our mess that he’s cleaning up until, oh, 2015 or so at the earliest. How he’s planning to blame the stimulus waste or inevitable cost overruns on health care on the right isn’t yet clear to me, but have faith. He’ll find a way. It’s … what he does.

Question: Given the electoral realities in Congress these days, is it really the right that’s his biggest pain in the ass?

Russia: New sanctions on Iran “counterproductive”