We hear more and more about the pushing of the Value Added Tax by the kommies in our midst, who thing every working (or spending) American is a mere cash sponge to be wrung out without mercy in order to finance the ever-increasing monetary demands of a socialist country.

Recently, progressives have made noise about introducing a value-added tax (VAT) in the United States. The VAT is an indirect tax — that is, Americans wouldn’t pay the tax directly to government, but would pay it to businesses as part of the retail price of things we buy, and businesses would then remit the tax to Uncle Sam.

A VAT is set at a fixed rate — say, 10 or 15 percent — added to the price of a good at every step of production, with a deduction allowed for the amount of VAT paid during earlier stages of production. The more steps there are in transforming raw materials into complex consumer goods, the higher the resulting consumer price as a result of those multiple layers of taxation.

Many countries have VATs, including Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. One might say that a VAT is an emblem signifying that a country’s government consumes a large percentage of its GDP, for VATs seem to go hand-in-hand with big-budget nanny states.

The reason for this phenomenon is simple: Any government that seeks to be all things to all people, and therefore seeks to spend ubiquitously, must inevitably seek to tax ubiquitously. Such governments have insatiable appetites for revenue. Because VATs are cash cows, diverting huge sums of money from consumers to government, they are favorites of big-spending governments.

Unfortunately, though, VATs have significant negative economic consequences.

Because they inflate consumer prices, quantities demanded fall. Most often, the marginal buyers who can no longer afford to pay the higher price are poorer citizens. When government policy raises
prices, the first victims are poor people.

The second victims of a VAT are the workers who will lose their jobs as a result of falling demand for the newly higher-priced goods.

Many affluent Americans may not curtail their consumption, but because more of their money is diverted to the government treasury, their savings must correspondingly decline. This results in decreased capital accumulation, which, in turn, slows business expansion, development, and formation. It also slows the growth rate of labor productivity, hence retarding economic progress for workers.

Read on.

These leftists, who have no respect for the Constitution nor for the intentions of our founding fathers, and who certainly despise the very principles that define the United States of America, would love to watch our nation come apart, sinking into an abyss of socialism…

…and as a bit of lagniappe, let’s finish with an excellent and unrelated column by Wesley Pruden.

…from an exercise in idiotics to another skedaddler…

First we have a little Sebeliosity, bleaching just a smidgeon more character out of our everyday lives.

Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius said today that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is developing a new regulation that would require food manufacturers to display nutritional information on the front of packages.

This would mean that the front of a Wheaties box, for example, would display not only the smiling face of a famous athlete but also declare how many calories from fat are in each serving.

We Americans are obviously pretty dumb, if after all these years we haven’t figured out where to look on the side of a box, can or package, to read the nutrition information.

That is, if we are interested in doing so.

So, to compensate for our obtusesness, the information, courtesy of our micromanaging overseers in government, will be emblazoned across the front of the package where we can’t miss it.

Yes, I did refer to character — instead of the aisles lined by colorful packaging design, we’ll see plain white rectangles of “facts & figures” as we shop.

That’s very California-like: The politicians in California love their signs, notices and warnings, as they have more micromanagerial rules and more things they feel they must caution folks about than do most entire continents.

Of course, like our federal government these days, California is also run by far left liberals.

Meanwhile, we have another felonious Constitution-violating Kongressional kriminal heading for the tall timber with the usual rat-deserting-a-sinking-ship excuse that he wants to spend more time with his family.

Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak, targeted for defeat by Tea Party activists for his crucial role in securing House approval of the health care overhaul, said Friday he would retire from Congress this year.

The nine-term congressman told The Associated Press he could have won re-election and insisted he wasn’t being chased from the race by the Tea Party Express, which is holding rallies this week in his northern Michigan district calling for his ouster. Instead, Stupak said he was tired after 18 years in office and wanted to spend more time with his family.

It seems like an awful lot of the corrupt traitors (yes, they are, as well as stone felons: Every last one of those pieces of Kommie Krap took the oath to protect and defend the Constitution, so in my book, having both violated their oaths to G-d and the American people and shit on the Law of the Land, they should be prosecuted for felonies) who violated the Constitution in order to shackle us with the onslaught of ObamaCare have suddenly developed a shared yen to change their career tracks and spend more time with the ol’ family.

Right, of course — they’ve merely sacrificed themselves for the party, and no doubt the party will take care of them, since a bribe’s a bribe, right? These toilet cakes know they’re finished among the voters in their districts, so they’re “gracefully” bowing out.

Where are tar and feathers and the noose when we need them?

When B. Hussein Obama was first elected to the Presidency, I and my co-writers here at Hard Astarboard really did determine to give the man a chance without any pre-inaugural condemnation such as that received by George W. Bush from the fraction of a second he was elected until… actually, they’re still blaming Dubya for everything from an act of nature to the decades old shooting of J.R. (remember that?). More extreme tinfoil hatters even, to this day, sccuse him of complicity in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

But back on track — we tried, seriously tried, to cut the far left product of the Chicago Machine some slack. Neither Wolf, Chuck nor myself wanted to display disunity of American citizens in the face of the rest of the world, like that which the Democrats have displayed through three wars, their opportunistic, not-very-patriotic patrons on the Hill currying their favor by turning these wars into political circuses, resulting in prolonged conflict, boosts to enemy morale and the deaths of U.S. service personnel as a bi-product of it all.

The problem was, Mr. Obama declared, in his every word from the time he was elected, that the Constitution was irrelevant as it conflicted with his own agendas for America, which have been much, much nearer to the propogation of marxism than to the concepts upon which this great country was founded.

The programs this president has pushed from the start have been so anti-American as most of our countrymen understand that to mean that the three of us saw no option but to abandon our “wait-and see” attitude in a so-called New York minute.

The “community organizer” provides a veritable smorgasbord of targets for anyone with even a drop of patriotic blood, so…

Unlike Bubba Clinton, whom we learned had a multitude of uses for interns, the Obama Administration has few to none.

The Obama administration’s top law enforcement officer at the Labor Department, M. Patricia Smith, is targeting companies that give young people unpaid internships. She claims that internships are rife with abusive practices and that serious violations of labor law are widespread. Arguing that interns should get paid at least minimum wage, Ms. Smith and the White House risk destroying a valuable steppingstone that gives many young Americans training they need to get jobs they want in the future.

Unpaid internships are valuable for many reasons. Most simply, they help people test whether they are a good fit for a particular industry. If interns like the type of work at particular companies, internships can help them get the training and contacts they need to make their career aspirations a reality. The short time that interns spend at jobs - often just two to three months - makes it difficult for firms to both train these young people and get much work out of them. From manufacturing to nonprofits to media companies such as The Washington Times, hands-on opportunities open through internships are almost endless.

Change, indeed.

Basic economics teaches that if the price is raised, demand falls. If companies have to pay wages, they will take on fewer interns. If these youngsters were actually benefiting companies more than it costs to train them, companies would pay them. Profit-seeking companies compete against each other for employees. If untrained students were such valuable workers, firms would gladly offer money to beat out the competitor next door to get them.

Some statements by the administration suggest that their actions are not simply motivated by the welfare of the kids who get internships. The O Force worries that unpaid internships might disadvantage less-affluent students, who might not be able to afford to spend their summers at unpaid jobs. But the administration’s solution risks eliminating many internships at for-profit companies so that no one gets them.

The Obama administration, which is full of rhetoric about improving education, actually views education extremely narrowly. In the real world, people gain a lot of practical knowledge on the job. Eliminating training opportunities will only mean worse careers and lower future earnings for those President Obama’s team is claiming to protect.

Ah, sweet Utopia. These lefties are clueless about the marketplace, no matter how many times reality smacks them in the face.

“It hasn’t worked the last ninety nine times, so it should work the hundredth.”

Then again, when Obama sees the results of this one, he can always issue one of those Constitutionally unauthorized royal edicts executive orders, one to the effect that every private concern has to use X amount of interns, like it or not, and compensate them with wages and benefits, including comprehensive health insurance.

While we’re on the subject of Obama, Wesley Pruden writes:

What this country needs, in addition to the elusive nickel cigar, is a president with less presence and more absence. Not just from Barack Obama, but from whoever follows him as well. Celebrities, even presidents, can be too much among us. They, like us, suffer for it.

The jet airplane, the ubiquitous television camera and now the Internet have conspired to illustrate as nothing ever has that familiarity breeds contempt, that it’s absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Women once knew that by female instinct, until they aspired to be men, minus the body odor and whiskers. (Some of them are working on that.) The studio moguls in Hollywood understood that, too, when Hollywood was still Hollywood, populated by movie stars. Now Hollywood, like Washington, is populated only by actors, who compete to see who can look and smell most in need of a bath. Jane Russell, one of the last of the authentic movie stars, once told me how she couldn’t slip out of her house for a quick trip to the supermarket for a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread without her make-up, manicure, heels and hair perfectly in place. It was in her contract. (Meryl Streep, our only surviving movie queen, projects the old star power precisely because she remembers the formula.)

You might think that a president, being the most powerful man in the world, able to start wars on a whim, wouldn’t be so eager to get noticed. Indeed, presidents once carefully rationed their availability, even for photo-ops. FDR, Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower would never be available for a photo-op with Miss Drumsticks of the Ozarks, even for a cause so grand as commemorating poultry plentitude. Barack Obama has not yet descended to the chicken house, but that may be in the works. He never misses an opportunity to take his noisy community activism on the road.

Heh, heh…

Read on…

…I was watching Obama Hatchetwoman Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius give her spiel on C-Span this morning and was struck by the wideness of the spectrum encompassed by Obama’s “Health” Care program.

Unsurprisingly, the thin lipped, angular featured (I don’t want to make disparaging remarks about anyone’s appearance, but she did kinda’ sorta remind me of a hatchet, come to think of it) cabinet member managed to incorporate education, “acceptable” foods, corporate salaries and a few other items in there that I simply couldn’t relate to health care, per se, but maybe that was just me.

My own impression was that she was laying the groundwork for the mega-agenda distribution of the soon-to-be voluminously increased taxes we will behold as the Obama Administration and its Pelosi led, Congressional marxist contingent do their unconstitutional best, under the blanket misnomer of “health care”, to strip us of our liberty and as much of our hard earned money as they possibly can.

“Now,” say Barack & Company, “let’s try this…”

The Obama administration is replacing an emergency order that has required extra airport screening of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries with a system that will vet all U.S.-bound passengers against a broader array of intelligence sources, two senior administration officials said Thursday.

Do tell.

The new system will treat all passengers flying into the USA the same way, regardless of nationality, said the officials, who were briefed on the policy. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy is not being announced until today.

The policy is the Obama administration’s latest effort to tighten international aviation security since a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boarded a flight in Amsterdam allegedly carrying explosives in his underwear. Authorities said Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up the jet, which landed safely in Detroit.

Yes, but no thanks to our last set of policies.

In early January, the administration required foreign airports to give extra checkpoint scrutiny to anyone flying to the United States from one of 14 countries or who is a citizen of one of those countries.

Islamic groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council assailed the policy as profiling because most of the countries, such as Algeria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, are predominantly Muslim.

What part of “So are terrorists!” don’t they understand?

The policy being phased in this month will use intelligence snippets about terrorists whose full names are not known.

Authorities will put together information such as a terrorist’s partial name, facial features, recent travel history or home country. U.S.-bound passengers who match those descriptions will face extra checkpoint screening at foreign airports, according to one of the administration officials.

Hmmm, I can see a real quagmire coming here. They went from profiling, which apparently worked, to not only not profiling, but also going the opposite way and harrassing little old ladies and one legged deaf mutes, while (witness the case of the underwear bomber) giving the benefit of the doubt to those who were indicated as “possible” Islamic “radicals”.

Now they’ll really confuse things, KISS principle be damned. Career bureaucrats and simple common sense are like matter and anti-matter, as they just don’t mix very well.

The system is tailored toward intelligence information and possible threats, rather than stopping people of a particular nationality, the official said.

One of the officials acknowledged shortcomings of the January order, calling it a blunt tool that is not as effective as it was initially because terrorists figured out how to circumvent it.

Very good, very, very good. So a couple of guys who fit the profiles of tangos earmarked for a specific terrorist Op are put through the works and cleared, then they stop the profiling in time for the real bin-Ladenite to cruise on through.

I’m still waiting to see how many years and how many terrorist successes or near misses it will take before they finally get it right, and instead of placing know-nothing, obtuse political appointees in charge of security venues, they actually hire some real, live security professionals.

Let’s not hold our breaths.

On another note entirely, don’t the Democrats have anybody in their “employment pool who doesn’t have any baggage on the order of lies, corruption or downright felonious behavior in his background?

From Wesley Pruden today,

Celebrating Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the most important holy day for Christians of all denominations, can be deadly in the Middle East. Reciting a Scripture or humming a hymn could cost your head in Saudi Arabia, and you could risk other highly valued body parts in the similarly benighted ninth-century neighborhoods abounding in the lands of caliphs, imams and ayatollahs.

Beheading is something of the national sport of Saudi Arabia, where the government has scheduled for Friday the gruesome ritual for a man, the father of five, accused of sorcery for “making predictions” in his native Lebanon. (Punditry can be risky there, too.)

Better to take your celebration to Israel, where the government will assist your visit. It’s the difference between Middle East and the cultural West, between the 8th and 21st centuries, between civilized and not-so-civilized. The Israeli guarantee of religious freedom, taken for granted in the nations of the West, is part of what invites hostility and belligerence from Israel’s neighbors.

Ah, yes. The sweet, sweet freedoms found in the Muslim world versus the liberty smothering, murderous, despotic aparthied of Israel. Right, Barack, Joe & Hillary?

Pilgrims proceed under protection today along the Via Dolorosa, believed to be the path that Christ took with His cross to the crucifixion at Calvary, and on to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Many Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, believe Christ was buried on the site three days before the Resurrection. Christians and everyone else are welcome to join the procession. Unless a suicide bomber or other evil-doer slips through security, no one will be harmed. The Israeli government guarantees it.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1948, declares Israel to be a Jewish state, but further declares that the nation “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.” It’s a promise bereft of Jeffersonian eloquence, but it’s plain and to the point.

My emphasis there. Try and find anything like that on the “Arab street.”

Moshe Dayan, the defense minister who led the Israelis to victory in the Six-Day War, was clear about religious tolerance and protection in a radio broadcast the morning Jerusalem was captured. “This morning,” he said, “the Israel Defense Force liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour - and with added emphasis ‘at this hour’ - our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights.”

And in a column today from Carolyn Glick that is, as always, right to the point:

There is an element of irony in the current crisis of relations between the Obama administration and Israel. On the one hand, although US President Barack Obama and his advisors deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama’s Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second term in office.

Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever. This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out of Obama’s White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad of course is because Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past ten days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisors. First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel’s capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel’s right to exist. Next, there was the somewhat anodyne — if substantively incorrect — written testimony by US Army General David Petreaus to the Senate about the impact of the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist on US-Arab relations. In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petreaus’s testimony to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Petreaus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally there is was the report this week in Politico in which nameless administration sources accused National Security Council member Denis Ross of “dual loyalties.” Ross of course has won fame for his career of pressuring successive Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

Read the rest here.

The differences between Islam’s definition of “civilized” and the western interpretation of same are 180 degrees apart, and when you examine these differences from the point of view of even one iota of decency, the Muslims come out looking pretty evil while the rest of us emerge looking good.

Despite the glaring obviousness of this concept, Barack Hussein and his White House junta choose to attack Israel while all but worshipping the terrorist spawning fascism of Islam. No matter how they attempt to justify it, Obama, Biden and Clinton are profoundly transparent where the reality of their positions are concerned: They are wrongly supporting our enemies against our only true ally in the Middle East because they perceive Arab dictatorships and terrorism as being more in line with their own mindsets.

After all, the submission without quarter expected of a good Muslim is the same attitude they secretly wish they could provoke towards themselves among the American people, good facists that they are.

…and I’m remembering the joke NASCAR pulled a year ago, when they announced that the Obamunists had forbidden any of the automakers whom the government had bailed out to spend the money entering racing vehicles for NASCAR events.

It was quite the joke, they definitely got over on a few right thinking columnists and other commentators, bloggers and pundits, to judge by the feedback that issued forth from even a few of the better informed and more celebrated among us (not me, simply because I was rather indisposed that day -whew!)

Later in the day, of course, they did the corporate version of grinning and told the truth, that the announcement had been an April Fool’s Day joke.

I’ve been thinking, and realize that the Obama Administration and the far left dominated Congress just might be able to redeem themselves with the American people if they announced that every single thing they’ve done since a) the Democrat majority was sworn in in January, 2009 and b) Obama was ordained sworn in a year later was an elaborate April Fool’s joke and that they really aren’t communists or jihad sympathizers, but Americans who love their country, respect the Constitution and are about to vote unanimously to retract and reverse their every official act.

This is, of course, highly unlikely as it would be too much, for the American people, like waking up from a terrible nightmare to find that all is well in the world.

Unfortunately, all is not, and that is particularly true with the lying lefty loony linx who, through profoundly pounded propaganda from the kommie media and many a shovelfull of malarkey from the politicians both in the White House and on the Hill, finally won in their battle to staff the upper echelons of the U.S. Government with enemies of the state.

The only silver lining to that particular cloud is that we’ll be well rid of Barack Hussein in November 2012, at which time we’ll also have picked up the spares among the Democrat majority — the ones we won’t get to give the bums’ rush in November of this year.

However…

I actually came here to share another great Ann Coulter column, this week’s, which I received yesterday.

On the “Today” show this Tuesday, President Obama claimed the massive government takeover of health care the Democrats passed without a single Republican vote was a “middle of the road” bill that incorporated many Republican ideas.

One Republican idea allegedly incorporated into the Democrats’ health care monstrosity is “medical malpractice reform.” Needless to say, the Democrats’ idea of malpractice reform is less than nothing. Until trial lawyers are screaming bloody murder, there has been no medical malpractice reform.

The Democrats’ “malpractice” section merely encourages the states to set up commissions to “study” tort reform, in the sense that frustrated mothers “encourage” their kids not to slouch. By “study,” the Democrats mean “ignore.”

So we get more taxpayer-funded government workers under the Democrats’ “medical malpractice reform,” but not one tittle of actual reform.

Democrats manifestly do not care about helping Americans get quality health care. If they did, they could not continue to support trial lawyers like John Edwards making $50 million by bringing junk lawsuits against doctors who are saving people’s lives. (At least Edwards has not done anything else to publicly disgrace himself since then.)

At a minimum, any health care bill that purports to improve Americans’ health, rather than trial lawyers’ bank accounts, must include a loser-pays rule and a restriction on damages to actual losses — as opposed to punitive damages, which mostly serve to enrich the John Edwardses of the world, and their mistresses.

LOL!!!!

The Democrats also lyingly claim their health care reform includes the Republican ideas of competition across state lines.

I know they’re lying because — well, first because I read the bill — but also because Democrats are genetically incapable of understanding the free market. You might say it’s a pre-existing condition with them.

The Democrats will lie to anybody about anything if they believe it will help one of their destructive agendas reach fruition.

Democrats want to turn the entire citizenry into welfare recipients.

Amen to that!

Truncating a ways…

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth — and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.)

How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?

How did that happen without Barney Frank and Henry Waxman personally designing the 3-foot-long, 26-pound, ugly green $4,000 cell phone we all have to use?

How did that happen without Obama signing the National Cell Phone Reform bill, as a poor 10-year-old black kid who couldn’t afford to text-message his friends looked on?

The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.

Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.

The column can be found here, in its entirety.