We are doing another book giveaway here at Geek Politics. I have 5 more books to give out thanks to the generosity of Hachette Book Group. The book we are giving away is How Successful People Think by John Maxwell.

To enter, follow me @clarky07 on Twitter and tweet the following sentence:
RT @clarky07 John Maxwell Book Giveaway by #GeekPolitics - http://bit.ly/wW3zU Please RT

If you don’t know what Twitter is, you can find out more here. Alternately, you can leave a comment on this post to enter giving your thoughts / ideas about the health care problem in America. I will compile the best responses into a future post.

The contest will run through the end of May.

Subscribe to our feed to stay tuned for my review of the book and for the announcement of the winners. I will direct message on twitter or email the winners to get their addresses, and Hachette will mail the book directly to them.

Congress thinks it is a good idea to tax your pop (or soda, soda pop, coke, depending on where you live). I’m from Ohio, so it is going to be pop for the rest of this article.

This is what the WSJ says about the pop tax:

Senate leaders are considering new federal taxes on soda and other sugary drinks to help pay for an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system.

The taxes would pay for only a fraction of the cost to expand health-insurance coverage to all Americans and would face strong opposition from the beverage industry. They also could spark a backlash from consumers who would have to pay several cents more for a soft drink.

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee is set to hear proposals from about a dozen experts about how to pay for the comprehensive health-care overhaul that President Barack Obama wants to enact this year. Early estimates put the cost of the plan at around $1.2 trillion. The administration has so far only earmarked funds for about half of that amount.
…
Health advocates are floating other so-called sin tax proposals and food regulations as part of the government’s health-care overhaul. Mr. Jacobson also plans to propose Tuesday that the government sharply raise taxes on alcohol, move to largely eliminate artificial trans fat from food and move to reduce the sodium content in packaged and restaurant food.

The beverage tax is just one of hundreds of ideas that lawmakers are weighing to finance the health-care plans. They’re expected to narrow the list in coming weeks.

What happened to not raising taxes on the 95% of Americans that make less than 250k a year? Much like the cigarette tax hike, this is straight out of FDR’s playbook during his New Deal. Politically, he couldn’t get away with raising income taxes on the poor, but he had to raise taxes to pay for all the socialist policies he was putting in place. Any of this sound familiar?

Obama has lots of socialist policies that he wants to enact. He has to pay for them somehow. The estimates for his health care are 1.2 trillion. He put about 600 billion in the budget. The costs will almost certainly be higher than the estimates, based on the greedy nature of people getting things for free. Look at what is happening at emergency rooms around the country and with the children’s health insurance in Hawaii.

Since there is a hole of hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama is going to have to find a way to fill it. That is going to be higher taxes for everyone and bigger deficits for our children and grandchildren to be saddled with. Those are the only two solutions, and these programs are going to be something we have to live with for a long time. Look at the failure that is social security. It is a Ponzi scheme that is so much bigger than anything Madoff did.

This is a guest post from Jacob at We the People Politics. If you are interested in guest posting at Geek Politics, check out the guidelines here.

I was trying to decide what I wanted to write about to submit to Derek, but I kept drawing a blank. I’m more of a liberal and he’s a conservative. He believes that the government spending is ridiculous and I believe that there are instances where a little government spending is important. However, when I happened across his article about being a conservative on Digg, I realized what I wanted to write about.

Why has America been reduced to such ideological hatred?

Derek mentioned how he was never allowed on the front page of Digg because the readership is mostly liberal and because of this, they don’t want to allow his content to reach the front. Why would they want a conservative to get his opinion across? This wasn’t the first time that I noticed trends of ideological hatred.
Read more…

This is from an article from the AP:

Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama’s “Making Work Pay” tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.
…
But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.

I guess that’s what happens when you put a guy who can’t even manage to do his own taxes as the head of the Treasury.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union raised concerns about the effect of the tax credit on pension payments in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in March.

Geithner responded that Treasury and IRS understood the concerns and were “exploring ways to mitigate that effect.”

Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said Geithner has yet to respond to concerns raised by committee members.

“So far we’ve got the, ‘If we don’t address this maybe it will go away’ approach,” Camp said.

That’s great, they screw up and then they don’t even let anybody know. We could have just sent out checks to everybody and been done with it. Now we have lots of people getting accustomed to having more money and many won’t know what to do when it gets taken away after the tax credit runs out. We also have millions more who are actually getting more than they are supposed to who are going get hit with an unexpected tax bill next April.

Remember what Reagan said the nine scariest words in the English language are, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

We have a new layout and theme here at Geek Politics. Check it out, scan a few pages and let me know what you think about it in the comments.

“Reagan’s dead and he was a lousy President.” I’m sorry, but Reagan was a great President and government is the problem. Even if he was a lousy President, you’d still be an ass Mr. Olberman.

Hat Tip Gateway Pundit

It is not easy. I start off with a lot of strikes against me. Digg is a mostly liberal crowd. For some unknown reason Digg doesn’t really like bloggers. Finally, Digg doesn’t like having the same topic show up, so even if something is very popular after awhile people start burying it just because they get sick of it. Ron Paul is where this applies for me as we talk about libertarian ideas quite a bit. He used to hit the front page on a daily basis, now months go by without a single article with his name hitting the front page.
Read more…

The Lid recently posted this:

CNN is reporting (and it has been confirmed by the administration) that as part of the bankruptcy filing the $7.2 Billion Dollars given to Chrysler by the American people will not be paid back. Don’t think of it as wasting $7.2 billion dollars, think of it as a nice little gift to the United Auto Workers. And don’t forget, we gave GM over $15 Billion. How soon before that goes away also?

I wrote about the Big Failed Three in December:

It’s sad really, that the taxpayers are going to be on the hook for another 15 billion in bailout money. Apparently that is the amount that Congress thinks will save GM and Chrysler.
…
The fact is that there is no way 15 billion will save these companies. It will only postpone the inevitable.

Well, how about that, Chrysler is going bankrupt and the American taxpayers are out over 7 billion dollars. Like I said, shocking news. So shocking that I wrote it 5 months ago.
Read more…