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How liberals plan to raise your taxes

March 27, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward

Liberals in Congress, who leave shortly for a two-week recess, have released their blueprint for the federal government’s 2008 budget, and it isn’t pretty. It contains what Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl calls “the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.”

“This classic tax-and-spend budget,” Heritage’s Brian Riedl writes, “would likely assure the expiration of the tax cuts that have helped to create jobs and promote economic growth.” The new budget, he explains, would “seize $899 billion more from Americans than is taken under today’s tax rates.”

Riedl, the Grover Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs, breaks down the numbers. Over the next ten years, “the expiration (or required offset) of all existing tax cuts” would

  • Increase the average household’s taxes by $2,641 annually.
  • Raise projected revenues by $3,268 billion.
  • Cause a spike in tax revenues to the second highest level since World War II.

On top of all that, the House of Representatives has just passed an outrageous new spending bill. Originally designed to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the supplemental bill has been larded up with $21 billion in wasteful spending unrelated to defense. In other words, the troops are being held hostage to special interests like citrus farmers, shrimp fisherman and states that can’t manage their own health care programs.

As if that’s not bad enough, this new bill also contains unconstitutional provisions that limit the President’s authority under the Constitution as commander in chief.

Take our poll: Should Congress impose constraints on the President’s authority as commander in chief in order to end the war in Iraq?

Many liberals campaigned last year, and appropriately so, against wasteful government spending that ran up the bill for the American people. They should remember that fiscal restraint is good policy, not just good rhetoric.

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Not just ‘for the children’

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program was designed to provide block grants to assist states in providing get health care coverage to uninsured children from low-income families. It was intended to help “low-income, uninsured children whose families earned too much for Medicaid but not enough to purchase private coverage,” Heritage health care expert Nina Owcharenko notes.

But some states have expanded this program tremendously—and they want you to pick up the tab. Click here for more.

The cost of global warming taxes

Liberals have often proposed raising gasoline taxes as a way of curbing global warming. If taxes are higher, the theory goes, people will drive less and emit less carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. European countries have gas taxes of nearly $4.00 a gallon and prices at the pump are in excess of $6.00.

But are high gas prices forcing Europeans off the roads? Click here for the answer from Heritage’s Ben Lieberman.

A D.C. vote in Congress? Not so fast

A measure introduced in Congress would grant a vote in the House of Representatives to the District of Columbia, whose liberal-leaning residents have long clamored for representation. According to this plan, which was backed by members of both parties, conservative-leaning Utah would gain one seat as well.

But while this plan may have been “bipartisan,” that doesn’t mean was good law.

Click here to find out what the Founders thought about voting in the nation’s capital.

In other news

  • Iran has kidnapped fifteen British sailors and marines, claiming they had invaded Iranian waters with aggressive intentions. The British government, which has demanded their immediate return, maintains that its personnel were in Iraqi waters conducting routine inspections.
  • The government has lost track of more than 600,000 immigrant felons that have been ordered to leave the United States, according to a Department of Homeland Security investigation.
  • Time magazine reports on the growing tend in public schools to offer elective classes in Bible literacy—not prayer in school as such, but an initiative to ensure students are well-versed in one of Western civilization’s most important texts.
  • Anti-war protesters in Portland burned a soldier in effigy and incinerated an American flag while chanting “Bye bye, G.I.! In Iraq you’re going to die!” Pajamas Media has the disturbing video.
  • By taking grizzly bears off the endangered species list last week because the population has stabilized , the federal government has restored to the states the regulation of the animals. Environmentalists insist, however, that the bears can survive only if Washington bureaucrats at the Fish and Wildlife Service impose hunting controls.
  • Voluntarily adopting the economic practices of Third World countries, like scheduled city-wide power outages, may not sound all that attractive. But businesses and homes in Sydney, Australia will do just that next Saturday when they shut off their lights as part of a bizarre stunt related to global warming. Organizers say that by cutting out the lights, Australians will be able to cut back on the “greenhouse gas” emissions they blame for recent warming.

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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.