Thursday Mashup (1/20/11)

From The Hill, Dem U.S. House Rep Earl Blumenauer of Oregon tells us the following (here)…

National public broadcasting is very cost effective and an excellent example of a public-private partnership maximizing value for the taxpayer. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) annually receives around .0001% of the federal budget. Cutting CPBs funding would save Americans less than half a cent a day and would result in the loss of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), considered by the public to be the second-best use of taxpayer dollars, outranked only by defense spending.

…

If federal funding was cut, big cities like New York, Los Angeles, DC, even Portland, would still be able to sustain public broadcasting stations, albeit with reduced programming.

It would be the rural areas of our country that would suffer the most. Providing public broadcasting services to Burns, Oregon costs eleven times as much as what it costs to reach Portland.

Lakeland Public Television in Bemidji, Minnesota is the only local broadcaster in most of its service area, and it is also the regions only source of local news and public affairs programming. In Colorado, Rocky Mountain PBS is the public media resource for all Coloradans. Both rely on CPB funding for about 30% of their annual budget, what local contributions could not cover if CPBs budget was eliminated.

And do you want to guess how fast Flush Limbore and his clone army would stomp into that void to fill it, assuming they aren’t there already?

This, of course, is a replay of what Baby Newton Leroy Gingrich tried when he was House Speaker in the mid-‘90s, and in response, the New York Times told us here that, “the attempt failed in the face of cooler legislative heads and the proven indispensability of public broadcasting.”

Really, though, what else could the voters of this country have expected except “values voter” pabulum as opposed to actual governance (here)?

Yeah, those jobs will start showing up any day now – won’t they, Mr. Boehner (and Mikey The Beloved)?

Next, Pancake Joe Pitts, with his newly-acquired clout as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, inflicted the following over at USA Today (here)...

For the record, Republicans worked for years to improve America's health care system. We created popular Medicare Advantage plans and Medicare prescription drug coverage. We created Health Savings Accounts. We created the medical insurance tax deduction for the self-employed. We fought for medical malpractice reform and cost-saving association health plans — only to see them filibustered in the Senate.

It has already been pointed out that Medicare Advantage is a scam that is more expensive than traditional Medicare, and the budget-busting Part D prescription drug benefit created the infamous “donut hole” into which many participants fell and were thus excluded from coverage (fixed by the health care reform that Pitts despises). Health savings accounts only benefit those with enough money to squirrel away the funds for them, and tort reform doesn’t do anything to lower premiums.

But what really got me about this was Pitts’ line that his party “created the medical insurance tax deduction for the self-employed.”

I’ve been trying to source that claim, and I have not been successful to this point. However, if it is indeed true, they didn’t do a very good job of it (at least when it comes to making health insurance more affordable for the self-employed).

Because, as noted here (and we’re going to get “deep in the woods” with the numbers, I know)…

Like employees, self-employed individuals also get a tax break for the purchase of health insurance for themselves, their spouses, and their children (see the definition of "self-employed" at the end of this article). But instead of excluding premiums from gross income as employees do, self-employed people get a deduction. It´s an "above the line" deduction taken on page 1 of Form 1040, so the self-employed person benefits from the deduction even if he doesn´t itemize. This evens up things between the self-employed person and the employee. Right? Well, not really.

Let´s look at an example. Belén owns an interior design business that has net income of $89,000 for 2006. She pays monthly insurance premiums of $500 to cover herself and her husband, a total of $6000 for the year. By deducting the cost of the premiums, Belén saves $1500 in taxes. On the other hand, Esther, whose salary was exactly the same as Belén´s net income, spent $6000 on medical insurance, just as Belén did; but Esther saved $1959 on her taxes, plus her employer saved an addition(al) $459.

The difference between Esther's savings and Belén's is due to social security and Medicare taxes. Belén has to pay them on the $6000 used for insurance premiums. Esther doesn´t. Belén´s income from self-employment shown on Schedule C is still $89,000, and that´s the amount used to calculate Belén´s self-employment tax (the equivalent of Esther´s social security and Medicare). Esther and her employer are $918 better off than Belén.

And as usual, the Repugs speak with a “forked tongue,” as they say, when they discuss the “self-employed” (from prior lined post)...

Note: for purposes of health care deductions, the self-employed category includes a broader range of businesses than one might expect. In addition to the self-employed individual who reports income and expenses on Schedule C of his or her Form 1040, the following individuals are also considered to be self employed: general partners of a partnership, and limited partners who receive guaranteed payments; members of a limited liability company (LLC) taxed as a partnership or disregarded entity; and shareholders owning more than 2% of an S corporation who received wages or a salary from the corporation.

Also (from here)…

Because self-employed workers have no corporate employers to match their payroll tax contributions to Social Security and Medicare, they pay double the rate of wage and salary workers in a levy known as the self-employment tax equal to 15.3% of their net earnings. That's on top of regular state and federal income taxes, and the income they spend on health premiums is not exempt.

"Why is it that a person who is self-employed and pays for that insurance themselves, why isn't that deductible?"

And as noted here, Health Care Reform contained a small business tax credit for health insurance (which Pitts opposes, of course)

Pitts also supported the so-called “Small Business Health Fairness Act of 2005” (here, along with Mikey The Beloved of course), which, by exempting associated health care plans from state regulation, would have “increase(d) average health care costs for small businesses and reduce the number of workers with health insurance.”

And if you want to go back even further than 2005, this tells us that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the Dems passed in ’09 was based on a ’93 Senate Repug plan (yes, they actually had one) for health care reform which would have increased the allowable deduction (from 25 percent to 100 percent) for the qualified health insurance costs of self-employed individuals (sooo…if it was originally a Repug idea, why does Pitts dislike it so much?).

As I browsed around Pitts’ web site to find some logic on this and other issues (a fool’s errand, I suppose), I came across this recollection of his called “Two Weeks on Frogs and Onions,” which apparently has to do with survival training he endured while in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War (a requirement for running bombing missions in case his plane went down in enemy territory, I believe).

Actually, I think it would behoove him to take something of an update to that training now called “Two Weeks Without Perks And Bennies As A Member Of Congress,” and then maybe, just maybe, he’d start to find a clue as to the utter idiocy of his opposition to health care reform, which enables everyone to get a little bit more of a taste of what is guaranteed to him for the rest of his life.

Finally, I really need to give Holy Joe Lieberman the sendoff that he so richly deserves in light of his decision not to run for another term in the U.S. Senate (here)…

This reminds us that Lieberman voted to confirm Alito (and Roberts too) to the Supreme Court and gave Bushco a pass on Katrina.

This tells us that he thought the order to remove Terri Schaivo’s feeding tube was in accordance with the 14th amendment to the Constitution (never mind the rulings that opposed it in favor of husband Michael Schiavo…I think the vid is kaput by now).

This shows him pontificating on the “surge” in Iraq, of course.

This reminds us that he endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008.

This also reminds us that he opposed emergency contraception for rape victims, saying in Connecticut it’s just a “short ride” to another hospital.

Here, he recently compared himself to JFK while decrying “partisan political boxes” when saying he wouldn’t run for another term in 2012 (and regarding the utter laughability of that remark, I give you this to commemorate JFK’s inauguration speech, which he gave 50 years ago today).

And believe it or not, we have “breaking” Lieberman news here, in which he said "I don't think you've read it, sweetheart” to Arianna Huffington when she pointed out to this numbskull with 100 percent accuracy that the Duelfer Report did not say that Iraq possessed WMD prior to Gulf War II.

However, there is one group of individuals who actually will miss Lieberman, and you can find out who they are here (and as someone recently remarked on “Countdown,” probably the reason Lieberman supported the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is that it would hasten his vision of an American where everyone was employed in the military because there were no jobs anywhere else).

Yes, we’re still going to be stuck with him for a little while longer. But about two years from now, this loathsome, execrable worm will slither out of the U.S. Senate for good, and on that day, we will all rejoice.