Check out his income tax returns. Bulk of his income

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Poster tried to get you to read this before but obviously ignored by most. You might want to remember this at the polls......... This was just back in March when this was attempted by Obama.. your hero!

WASHINGTON - Presidential candidates John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton interrupted their campaign schedules to return to the Senate for votes on taxes and spending likely to become key points of contention in the race for the White House.

Votes on tax cuts and on a one-year ban on pet projects topped the Senate�s agenda before an expected late-night vote yesterday to pass a $3 trillion Democratic budget blueprint. The nonbinding plan predicts a balanced budget in four years and promises generous increases for many domestic programs, but achieves those goals only by assuming major tax increases when President Bush�s tax cuts expire in about three years. This was found out and release the morning after they tried to get this passed in the mddle of the night back in March.

Obama(D-Ill.) and Clinton (D-N.Y.) both promise to reverse Bush�s tax cuts for wealthier taxpayers, but the Democratic budget they�ll be voting for would allow income tax rates to go up on individuals making as little as $31,850 and couples earning $63,700 or more.

in this household. Sure, we could lose our jobs, however, we are quite prepared for something like that. We have an emergency fund in place that would last at least a year (a year's worth of mortgage and utilility payments), we don't have a car payment, all credit cards are paid off and we have CDs, retirement funds, etc. It's called planning for the future and planning for the unexpected. We have paid into unemployment, so of course we would take it if we had to.

Do you believe that a federal sales tax to replace the current income tax system would be a good move? Do you think it would be more fair or less fair and why?

I agree that the bill is a bit confusing, but I think it's great so many of us are actually looking into it to find out what it is really about. I think the New York Times article below clarifies the income guidelines pretty well. I also want to say that I heard that if we go with Bush's $5 billion plan for SCHIP it will be grossly underfunded, as apparently, it is already underfunded and many kids who qualify with the current income guidelines cannot get on SCHIP, so I hope he is willing to at least compromise and give more money to the program if his veto isn't overridden. It's for a good cause, darn it!

"Oct. 16 � It is the $83,000 question: Could children with that amount of family income qualify for subsidized health insurance under the bipartisan bill passed by Congress and vetoed by President Bush?

When the House votes Thursday on whether to override the veto, Republicans will insist that the answer is yes. They will express outrage that rich children could get coverage from the government while hundreds of thousands of poor children still go uninsured.

Democrats say it is a total distortion for Mr. Bush and his Republican allies to say that the bill allows coverage with family incomes up to $83,000 a year.

Who is right? Each side appears to overstate its case. The bill does not encourage or prohibit coverage of children with family incomes at that level.

Of the 6.6 million children now covered by the program, most come from families with incomes well below $83,000, and the bill would give states financial incentives to sign up low-income children who are eligible but not enrolled.

In general, children with family incomes below the poverty level ($20,650 for a family of four) are eligible for Medicaid. The State Children�s Health Insurance Program is meant for families with too much income to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private insurance.

Mr. Bush said Monday that the bill would expand eligibility for the program up to $83,000.

But Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and an architect of the bill, said Tuesday that the president�s argument was specious. �About 92 percent of the kids will be under 200 percent of the poverty level,� Mr. Hatch said at a news conference with supporters of the bill, including the singer Paul Simon.

Another Republican author of the bill, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, said the White House claims were �flatly incorrect.�

States establish income limits for the child health program. A recent survey by the Congressional Research Service found that 32 states had set limits at twice the poverty level or less, while 17 states had limits from 220 percent to 300 percent of the poverty level. Only one state, New Jersey, has a higher limit. It offers coverage to children with family incomes up to 350 percent of the poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four.

In New York, which covers children up to 250 percent of the poverty level, the Legislature this year passed a bill that would have raised the limit to 400 percent of the poverty level, or $82,600 for a family of four. The Bush administration rejected the proposal, saying it would have allowed the substitution of public coverage for private insurance.

States that cover middle-income children often charge premiums and co-payments on a sliding scale, so the coverage is not free.

While the bill passed by Congress would not prohibit states from setting the income limit at $82,600, it would set stringent new standards for such coverage.

In general, after Oct. 1, 2010, a state could not receive any federal money to cover children above 300 percent of the poverty level unless a vast majority of its low-income children � those at or below 200 percent of the poverty level � were already covered. To meet this test, a state would have to show that the proportion of its low-income children with insurance was at least equal to the average for the 10 states with the highest rates of coverage of low-income children.

Moreover, if a state was allowed to cover children over 300 percent of the poverty level, the federal payment for those children would, in most cases, be reduced. New Jersey and New York would be exempt from the cuts if they met the bill�s other requirements.

Citing that provision, the White House said Oct. 6 that the bill included a �grandfather clause� allowing higher payment rates for children above 300 percent of the poverty level in New Jersey and New York.

Jocelyn A. Guyer, a researcher at the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University, said: �This is a wildly contentious political issue, but it�s largely a theoretical question. More than 99 percent of children in the program are below three times the poverty level, and New York is the only state that has expressed any interest in going to four times the poverty level.�

Suzanne Esterman, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Human Services, said that 3,000 of the 124,000 children in the state program � about 2.4 percent � had family incomes exceeding three times the poverty level.

Some of the current confusion can be traced back to a bill introduced in March by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, both Democrats. They would have explicitly allowed all states to expand eligibility to families making four times the poverty level. But the bill passed by Congress did not go that far." -by Robert Pear

You guys are probably sick of hearing my opinions on this if you read the last thread, but I wanted to re-post this section of an article that addresses the income level concern. It sounds like the only state that asked for income guidelines to go as high as $83,000 was New York, and their request was denied, so that income level is not a part of the current bill. (To me it sounds like even the $60,000 guideline may be limited to New York, but I'm honestly not sure on that and will try to find out).

--The president also complained that the bill would cover too many children who don't need federal help. "This program expands coverage, federal coverage, up to families earning $83,000 a year. That doesn't sound poor to me," the president told the Lancaster audience.

Dorn says that's not exactly right, either. "This bill would actually put new limits in place to keep states from going to very high-income levels. SCHIP money would no longer be available over 300 percent of the federal poverty level, which is about $60,000 for a family of four."

The president gets to make the $83,000 claim because New York had wanted to allow children in families with incomes up to four times the poverty level onto the program. That is, indeed, $82,600. The Department of Health and Human Services rejected New York's plan last month, and under the bill, that denial would stand. White House officials warn, however, that the bill would allow a future administration to grant New York's request.

link to the entire article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14962685

(AP) Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.

The study by the Government Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate.

"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called "S" corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

"Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code," Edwards said.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren't paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices - amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities. The GAO did not suggest which companies might be doing this.

"It's time for the big corporations to pay their fair share," Dorgan said.

You can see plenty on michaesavage.com. I tried to copy/paste it, but this is all that transferred.

Piggy pols in hog heaven with pork-packed pact (New York Post) Congressional deal-brokers slopped a mess of pork into the $700 billion rescue bill passed by the Senate last night - including a tax break for makers of kids' wooden arrows ... Top 10 tax sweeteners in the bailout bill (Taxpayers for Common Sense) The "Transportation fringe benefit to bicycle commuters" allows employers to provide a benefit for costs associated with bicycle commuting ...

This is a video of T. Boone Pickens on the daily show. If you don't like Jon Stewart, don't let that discourage you from checking this out. Pickens is talking about the energy plan he has been promoting.

In the middle of the page is the video section. Go under that to the "coming up next" box and pick T. Boone Pickens.

Sorry about the round about directions, but I couldn't find the interview anywhere else.

France's model healthcare system

MANY advocates of a universal healthcare system in the United States look to Canada for their model. While the Canadian healthcare system has much to recommend it, there's another model that has been too long neglected. That is the healthcare system in France.

Although the French system faces many challenges, the World Health Organization rated it the best in the world in 2001 because of its universal coverage, responsive healthcare providers, patient and provider freedoms, and the health and longevity of the country's population. The United States ranked 37.

The French system is also not inexpensive. At $3,500 per capita it is one of the most costly in Europe, yet that is still far less than the $6,100 per person in the United States.

An understanding of how France came to its healthcare system would be instructive in any renewed debate in the United States.

That's because the French share Americans' distaste for restrictions on patient choice and they insist on autonomous private practitioners rather than a British-style national health service, which the French dismiss as "socialized medicine." Virtually all physicians in France participate in the nation's public health insurance, S�curit� Sociale.

Their freedoms of diagnosis and therapy are protected in ways that would make their managed-care-controlled US counterparts envious. However, the average American physician earns more than five times the average US wage while the average French physician makes only about two times the average earnings of his or her compatriots. But the lower income of French physicians is allayed by two factors. Practice liability is greatly diminished by a tort-averse legal system, and medical schools, although extremely competitive to enter, are tuition-free. Thus, French physicians enter their careers with little if any debt and pay much lower malpractice insurance premiums.

Nor do France's doctors face the high nonmedical personnel payroll expenses that burden American physicians. S�curit� Sociale has created a standardized and speedy system for physician billing and patient reimbursement using electronic funds.

It's not uncommon to visit a French medical office and see no nonmedical personnel. What a concept. No back office army of billing specialists who do daily battle with insurers' arcane and constantly changing rules of payment.

Moreover, in contrast to Canada and Britain, there are no waiting lists for elective procedures and patients need not seek pre-authorizations. In other words, like in the United States, "rationing" is not a word that leaves the lips of hopeful politicians. How might the French case inform the US debate over healthcare reform?

National health insurance in France stands upon two grand historical bargains -- the first with doctors and a second with insurers.

Doctors only agreed to participate in compulsory health insurance if the law protected a patient's choice of practitioner and guaranteed physicians' control over medical decision-making. Given their current frustrations, America's doctors might finally be convinced to throw their support behind universal health insurance if it protected their professional judgment and created a sane system of billing and reimbursement.

French legislators also overcame insurance industry resistance by permitting the nation's already existing insurers to administer its new healthcare funds. Private health insurers are also central to the system as supplemental insurers who cover patient expenses that are not paid for by S�curit� Sociale. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of the French population possesses such coverage, making France home to a booming private health insurance market.

The French system strongly discourages the kind of experience rating that occurs in the United States, making it more difficult for insurers to deny coverage for preexisting conditions or to those who are not in good health. In fact, in France, the sicker you are, the more coverage, care, and treatment you get. Would American insurance companies cut a comparable deal?

Like all healthcare systems, the French confront ongoing problems. Today French reformers' number one priority is to move health insurance financing away from payroll and wage levies because they hamper employers' willingness to hire. Instead, France is turning toward broad taxes on earned and unearned income alike to pay for healthcare.

American advocates of mandates on employers to provide health insurance should take note. The link between employment and health security is a historical artifact whose disadvantages now far outweigh its advantages. Economists estimate that between 25 and 45 percent of the US labor force is now job-locked. That is, employees make career decisions based on their need to maintain affordable health coverage or avoid exclusion based on a preexisting condition.

Perhaps it's time for us to take a closer look at French ideas about healthcare reform. They could become an import far less "foreign" and "unfriendly" than many here might initially imagine.

Paul V. Dutton is associate professor of history at Northern Arizona University and author of "Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France," which will be published in September.

Check out his income tax returns. Bulk of his income

Most Companies Pay No Federal Income Tax

GAO Study Also Finds 68% Of Foreign Companies In U.S. Avoid Corporate Taxes

France's model healthcare system