Free Republic

Obamacare has delivered another sucker punch to the middle class. This time it’s sticker shock. Now that a few people can get past the tech problems of HealthCare.gov and actually see the real cost of insurance plans available, they are finding that Affordable Care is big hit to the family budget. And when the family budget gets hit in the solar plexus, guess what happens to consumer spending and the economy. In California, policies for about 900,000 Californians are being canceled because of Obamacare’s mandates and about 2/3rd of these do not qualify for subsidies, according to The Chicago Tribune....

Example: You receive $5000.00 in medical insurance from your employer. At a 25% tax rate you will owe an additional $1250.00 in taxes.

Get ready to be blindsided by a barrage of new taxes. $1 trillion worth... They'll be coming courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. And they won't just be affecting those who make over $250,000. The bulk of these taxes will be passed on directly to the middle class. That's because while a majority of these "stealth taxes" were designed to be taxes on businesses, they're actually transferred directly to ordinary citizens. They include the investment income surtax, a Medicare payroll tax, even a "tanning tax" on those who utilize indoor tanning services. "Many of those [hidden]...

The Congressional Budget Office just confessed that the healthcare law passed by Democrats and only Democrats in 2010—you know the one that was supposed to save us so much money?-- is really a dud, a job killer, as we have said all along. And the consequences aren’t just that some guy you don’t know won’t have a job, the consequences are that guys you DO know won’t have jobs, and --in the best case—your tax bill will go up accordingly. The reform package, derisively known as Obamacare, is going to cost the country an additional 2 million jobs by 2017...

Americans will pay an average premium of $328 monthly for a mid-tier health insurance plan when the Obamacare health exchanges open for enrollment next week, and most will qualify for government subsidies to lower that price, the Obama administration said on Wednesday. The figure, based on data for approved insurance plans in 48 states, represents the broadest national estimate for how much Americans will pay for health coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law next year. The prices of the new plans are at the heart of a political debate over whether they will be affordable enough to attract...

When Indiana recently announced that individual health insurance costs in Indiana will rise 72 percent on average because of new Affordable Care Act requirements, an immediate outcry followed from some ACA supporters, who accused the Department of Insurance of misrepresenting these numbers in a deliberate attempt to mislead Hoosiers. The DOI provided a lengthy testimony about these numbers before the Indiana Health Finance Commission on July 22, and the DOI stands by its numbers. The fact remains that the Indiana individual health insurance market will see significant increases next year because of ACA. The following is some background about how...

Here comes the ObamaCare tax bill. The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills. But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.” Under ObamaCare, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 will pay an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra...

New Obamacare taxes that were previously kept secret have been unveiled by outraged customers who feel betrayed. Residents in many states have yet to feel the change that will come when President Obama's signature health care program which will go into full effect in January. But Blue Cross Blue Shield subscribers in Alabama got a glimpse of the future when they received their latest bill which had a separate line spelling out how much extra they will have to pay as a result of national health insurance. A local paper, AL.com, obtained a picture from a reader who received a...

The Congressional Budget Office’s warning that the Affordable Care Act will cause employment to fall by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers is just the latest of Obamacare’s negative surprises. Unfortunately, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” is proving to be depressingly accurate. The law’s defenders legitimately argue that it is not sufficient merely to criticize the Affordable Care Act; responsible action requires proposing an alternative. Fortunately, Republicans have a good one, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for the past...

High-income families would be hit with a tax increase on wages and a new levy on investments under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul bill. For the first time, the Medicare payroll tax would be applied to investment income, beginning in 2013. A new 3.8 percent tax would be imposed on interest, dividends, capital gains and other investment income for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000. The bill also would increase the Medicare payroll tax by 0.9 percentage point to 2.35 percent on wages above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples...

A primary rationale of ObamaCare's insurance reforms limiting age-rating and precluding pricing based on health status has been to ensure that people will be able to afford health coverage when they need it most. An IBD analysis finds that middle-class households in their late 50s and early 60s could spend 25% or more of their income on health care — before their deductible is exhausted and ObamaCare's benefits kick in. Covered California's shop-and-compare tool shows that a 58-year-old couple in Los Angeles County with $65,000 in income buying a bronze plan would have to spend $19,400, including $9,400 in premiums...

In the budget proposal he presented to Congress last month, President Barack Obama called for what would be the highest level of sustained taxation ever imposed on the American people, according to the analysis published last week by the Congressional Budget Office. Under Obama’s proposal, taxes would rise from 17.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2014 to 19.2 percent in 2024. During the ten years from 2015 to 2024, federal taxation would average 18.7 percent GDP.America has never been subjected to a ten-year stretch of taxation at that level. In the twelve fiscal years preceding the Japanese attack on...

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama is getting a number of critical report cards on his foreign and domestic policies lately. Here at home, Janet Yellen, in her first monetary policy address as the head of the Federal Reserve Board, said the labor markets were still weak, and that it will likely take two years or more before the U.S. fully recovers from its recession. Ouch. If Yellen's forecast proves right, this means it will have taken Obama's administration nearly eight years to lift our economy out of its long and painful lethargy.

SHAMOKIN DAN — The plant in Shamokin Dam once produced enough electricity to power a city three times the size of Scranton. It is 65 years old, but few here thought the facility known as the Sunbury Steam Plant would be forced into retirement. “It’s sad to see it close down,” said Robert Hoffman of Sunbury. “The plant`s been there since I can remember. As a matter of fact when i was in high school we toured that plant.” “Since they put stack reclaimers on it, its been a fairly clean plant,” added Ed Quiggle of Shamokin Dam Sunbury Generation...

There’s a damning number regarding our economy that Obama doesn’t want to talk about. It’s a number, but for him, would be lower. And, lower, in this case would be a good thing for the economy. “Although estimates vary,” says Joel Kurtzman, a senior fellow at the Milliken Institute, “American companies have between $4 and $5 trillion in liquid assets, a sum greater than the size of the German economy.” How is it that companies can now have more cash than anytime in history, while unemployment remains so high, inflation in many goods so low, and national income grows so...

The USDA has managed to make school lunches stink even more. So why does the government continue?>School lunches still stink. But now unprecedented numbers of students are refusing to eat them.Last month I noted that a GAO report had found that last school year's disastrous rollout of the updated USDA National School Lunch Program helped drive 1.6 million paying students from the lunch rolls. The new rules led some schools to abandon the program, as I reported in 2012. What's more, the new rules, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, have also resulted in unprecedented mountains of food waste.As I...

Ahead of the April 15 tax deadline, a record-high 60% of Californians say that they pay "much more" or "somewhat more" in taxes than they should, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) (and noted by John Seiler of Calwatchdog.org and Stephen Frank of CApoliticalnews.com). However, as PPIC Mark Baldassare notes at Fox&Hounds, Californians still believe that the answer is to tax wealthy earners or corporations more--not to reform and broaden the current tax system. The PPIC survey, which was conducted in March among 1,702 adults, notes: While about half of Californians view the...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) As more and more Americans find jobs, it's having a chilling effect on potential new entrepreneurs, according to a new industry report. Last year, 476,000 new businesses were created each month, mostly in the construction and services industries.... That's down 7% from 2012, when 514,000 new businesses were being created monthly....

A Democratic blitz this week for new orders and laws promising equal pay for women is a key agenda item the party hopes will boost turnout this fall among its most loyal voters. President Barack Obama signed two executive actions, which will bar federal contractors from retaliating against employees for comparing salaries and require contractors to report compensation data to the government by gender and race. A McClatchy analysis in January found that women employees at the White House make 91 cents for every dollar men make. The female share of the federal workforce also has declined under Obama, while...

Carney's points make sense, but don't those exact same arguments apply to the big, bad corporations Democrats are targeting? Of course they do. But that's not the point. As we discussed yesterday, Democrats are hoping to replicate their successful 2012 playbook by shifting voters' focus onto ancillary issues, and away from the political fundamentals. This week they're trotting out equal pay for women in an effort to underscore their "Republican war on women" meme. President Obama is signing two executive orders related to the issue today, while the Senate will debate the Paycheck Fairness Act: Obama's latest foray into the...