Cap And Tax Redux

There are so many terrible ideas coming out of Congress that friends of mine are suffering from near protest fatigue. Ironicly, as I write this, democrat operative Bob Shrumm is repeating the Pelosi pie-in-the-sky wishful though du jour, that the protesters are hired hacks. Well, my CPA is no hired hack. This is a bookish guy who quietly runs an admirable business with his wife, also a CPA, in a small office in South St. Louis County. He is fed up enough that he penned this analysis and invited me to share it. Enjoy:

AMERICAN CLEAN ENERGY AND SECURITY ACT (aka The Cap and Trade Bill)

On June 26, 2009 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the so-called Cap and Trade Bill. The Bill is over 1400 pages long (including 300 pages added early in the morning on the day of the vote in a cynical political move designed to railroad the bill through without adequate time for study or debate). Cap and Trade is a cute marketing term. This Bill covers much, much more than just the trading of carbon permits to reduce emissions. The Bill even contains a section about light bulbs. The Table of Contents for the Bill is 16 pages long!

With all the news focusing on health care legislation, it is easy to forget that this Bill has already passed the House and has been sent on to the U.S. Senate. It is expected that the Senate will debate and vote on the Bill this fall. It must be defeated! Senators will be in their home states during the month of August. They need to hear from the voters. They need to hear from you!!

Cap and trade involves setting a total cap on national greenhouse gas emissions and establishing a market for a finite number of allowances to emit greenhouse gases up to the total amount of the cap, which would be lowered gradually over time.

This Bill will be very harmful to the Unites States.

First: The Bill sets the ambitious target of reducing total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% below 2005 levels by the year 2050! In effect, the U.S. will need to reduce emissions to a level last experienced in 1910 when the U.S. had a population of 92 million (compared to the forecast population of 420 million in 2050). As this level of reduction is simply not possible, the Bill includes a large number of “offsets” which are treated as part of the reduction. Offsets essentially consist of planting more trees here in the U.S. and in developing nations. Carbon emitters (e.g. coal burning companies such as electric utilities) will pay developing nations to increase reforestation efforts. This is essentially a huge foreign aid program.

Congress can mandate emissions reductions for the United States but they cannot mandate them for the rest of the world. China and India, two of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, do not plan to reduce their emissions. Our adoption of these reductions will put us at a disadvantage to China and India and will not result in worldwide reductions of these emissions.

Second: If you own a home or other building, you need to be aware of Title II of the Bill which REQUIRES:

New buildings must be 30% more energy efficient than current building code standards effective immediately upon signing of the Bill. New buildings must be 50% more energy efficient by 1/1/2014 (residential) and 1/1/2015 (commercial). New buildings must become 5% more energy efficient every 3 years thereafter until they are 75% more efficient than current standards.

Existing buildings will be subject to inspection by the authorities to make certain that they meet the applicable energy efficiency standards: (1) When they are renovated, (2) when they are sold, or (3) when the person responsible for the utility bill is changed.

The Bill creates a big new Federal entitlement program which provides funds to pay up to 50% of the cost up to $12,200 to assist residential building owners and funds to pay up to 50% of the cost to assist non residential building owners to increase the energy efficiency of their homes/ buildings to prescribed levels. As expensive as this program will be to taxpayers, it still leaves the homeowner/building owner holding the bag for the other 50%.

As you can see, this Bill has a direct impact on you if you are a property owner. It will increase your costs, reduce your return or profit and reduce your freedom as a property owner to do with your property as you wish.

Third: The Bill is very harmful to the economy. The Heritage Foundation has estimated that the Bill will cause unemployment to increase by 2 million in 2012 and further increase to 2.5 million in 2035 and will cause GDP loss of $9.4 trillion by 2035.

Fourth: It will not even have a significant impact on global warming. Climatologist Chip Knappenberger of New Hope Environmental Services calculates that the Bill will reduce Earth’s temperature by .1 to .2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

This Bill needs to be defeated in the United States Senate. That can only be done if everyone contacts their Senator. If a Senator opposes the Bill, thank him or her. If a Senator is undecided make certain they know you oppose the Bill. If a Senator favors the Bill, make sure they know you don’t favor it, that you vote and that this Bill is important enough that you will vote against them in the next election.

The most effective means of contact is obviously person-to-person. Many Senators will be holding town meetings during the recess. If you can attend one, do so and speak up. If you can’t you should write an old-fashioned snail mail letter. The address is:

Office of Senator (Name)

United States Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

Each Senator has local offices also. You can find your Senators’ local offices in the Government pages in your local phone book. Alternatively, you can contact your Senator, by e-mail at www.Senate.gov. You can access the Senate Web Site and find your Senator’s Washington office phone # and call that office. You can also call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and they will put you through to your Senator’s office or you can also call their local office.

Cap and Trade can be stopped if we act!!

Prepared by Brent P. Stewart, CPA

Take Action, because you can!

Good news and bad news. First the bad:
As most of you know, Al Franken became the 60th vote in the Senate. That means the Republican opposition to the Democrat oligarchy is virtually disarmed. Obama, Pelosi and Reid can now pass anything upon which the three of them agree. So expect the newly filibuster proof Democrats to get even more brazen than they have been already.

For instance, while many business lobbyists are pinning their hopes against passage of EFCA on more moderate Democrats like Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, his staff pointed out to The Hill, that Nelson "abhors any kind of obstruction in the Senate". Not one Democrat Senator has committed to voting against the expected cloture motion.

The good:
Missouri is one of just 21 States in which voters have the right to petition their Government and change laws themselves.
The Missouri petiton drive to save the right to a secret ballot is in high gear. We have tipped the $100,000 raised mark and collected almost 40,000 signatures.
We still need your help.
Derek Grier has agreed to coordinate our statewide volunteer signature gathering effort. He can be reached at (314) 229-7232.

This is a great weekend to gather signatures. I can think of no better time than when people are at festivals celebrating our freedom, to ask them to sign a petition to guarantee their right to a secret ballot.

If you can help we can email you a downloadable petition and instructions that you can print at home.

Gina and I will be at the Taxpayer Tea Party at Rennick Park in Washington Missouri at 11am Saturday and will be looking for help there. Gina is a featured speaker and will be talking about SOS Ballot. Chesterfield is hosting an event Saturday at Chesterfield Mall.

Not surprising, union activists are harassing petition circulators. In a tactic called "blocking" the thug will approach a circulator and start a verbal battle to make sure no one wants to stop to sign and get into a fight. The thugs who want to intimidate people from signing a petition to preserve their right to a secret ballot are also arguing that workers should be stripped of their right to vote be secret ballot because we can trust union organizers not to intimidate people to join their union and pay dues for the privilege.

So if you see a thug at work harassing a pro-freedom petition circulator, why don't you jump right in, sign the petition (only once please) and then run interference on the thug and give him a piece of your freed0m-loving mind.

Meanwhile, have a great Independence Day weekend!

It takes one to know one.

This from Pravda. I guess I imagined the paper maybe died post-Glasnost. But there it is in a web2.0 World -- Online.

From Kruschev's favorite read:

"It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

Speak the truth and shame the devil on Pravda.ru forum"

This columnist's lament reminds me of the time when I was a teenager and the only one among my peers that did not drink alcohol. When I came home from a trip to Germany as an exchange student I was shocked by the reaction of a friend who had previously avoided me at the teenage parties where my sobriety particularly stuck out. I thought I could gain acceptance when I told him that I had a drink in Germany. His horrified reaction puzzled me. Then he explained. As long as I was sober, just one clean living teen, he had a conviction that what he was doing was wrong. So too, this columnist sees the lights fading in the "City on a Hill."

The Taxpayer Watchdog's Watchdog

I cannot imagine a much greater honor than to be eulogized in the National Review. That is a well-deserved honor befitting great men such as Richard Nadler. I knew him as a critic of politicians, one who challenged all of us to look closer at our core values as they related to the real role of government. In fact, he was the man who bestowed upon me one of my greatest honors, one which he did in fitting Nadleresque style. He gave me the title "Taxpayer Watchdog."

From the National Review:

National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru on Richard Nadler

NRO:

I just learned that one of my oldest and dearest friends, Rich Nadler, died this morning at his home in Kansas City. Rich was many things: a high-school dropout, an autodidact, a traveling jazz musician, an ex-communist, the publisher of the late, great K.C. Jones, a hilarious movie reviewer, the head of the Missouri Taxpayers Watchdog Association, and a sometime contributor to National Review and, lately, the Corner. In the last years of his life he was, above all, a devout orthodox Jew and a devoted husband to Barbara.

He gave me my start in journalism and constantly encouraged me, even as we came to disagree on some matters. He was one of the most brilliant men I have ever known. Now there are a hundred things I won’t be able to talk or argue with him about. R.I.P.

I received a phone call on Summer morning from a somewhat gleeful constituent. On the line was Lloyd Sloan, also a brilliant thinker along the lines of Richard Nadler. Together they made the toughest critics of politicians. They had completed the task of analyzing the voting records of the 88th General Assembly in Jefferson City, Missouri as a function of the Missouri Taxpayer Watchdog Association. Lloyd was kind of proud of the fact that the winner was his own State Rep. - yours truly. While I was honored indeed, the glory was doused in cold water when Lloyd told me, "Yeah, you got the best score in Jefferson City, but you still flunked."

Robin Hood - Renegade, Socialist or Tax Protester?

"He robbed from the rich and gave to the poor"
Oh, Really?
In the famous tale, the friend to all, defender of the defenseless, man of honor; Robin Hood reserves his lawless exploits for sacking the Sheriff of Nottingham. Why would the honorable man commit a crime or any act of injustice? The answer is in the question. A man of honor would not commit an act of injustice.

While much of the story is disputed, we know that his prime target is the Sheriff of Nottingham who is taxing everyone into near starvation. He is doing so under the limited authority of Prince John, the evil brother of King Richard the Lion Heart. King Richard, the legitimate ruler is away on the Crusades and Prince John contrives the story that he is raising taxes to pay the ransom to free King Richard. In truth, he is raising the taxes to overthrow his brother and take the throne.

So Robin Hood, loyal to God, Country and his fellow man, was acting in a legitimate manner, under authority, when he took action in protest against the unjust taxation by an illegitimate authority for an illegitimate purpose. Robin Hood was not a renegade or a socialist, he was a tax protester.

So it is today. The leftist propagandists who do have an answer for the non-partisan, fiscal prudence, anti-spending calls of the tax payer tea parties of 2009 are in full spin mode, attacking the messenger and twisting the message. Honor today is found in the peaceful protests of activists who know that the authorities (however loathsome) are legitimate but the policies are wrong. They know they cannot take up arms so they take up signs, blow horns and blogs. So while defamed daily by the leftist media, the tea party protesters are in very good company.

Conservatives are Pathetic Protestors…Until... A Tribute on Taxpayer Tea Party Day

http://stlouisteaparty.com/

We at the Taxpayer Tea Parties are taxpayers – not welfare cheats – not tax dodgers
We believe that you render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s
We resent that Caesar went on a wild spending spree and stuck our children w/ the tab.
We know that confiscatory tax burdens drive away jobs.
We know that the major corporations who leave cities, who left St. Louis City, like Southwestern Bell, now AT&T, left when Governor Carnahan passed the biggest tax hike in state history.
We can only be dismissed at the ignoramus’ peril.
We voted in Republicans who raised spending, we voted in Democrats who spent worse. We learned.
We shake our heads at pundits who want to dismiss us the usual tax protestors.
We view as dangerous, the apologists who refuse to acknowledge the problem.
We are rising up now because our very republic is at stake.
We are shocked that the $55 trillion social security and Medicaid debt already “earned”, obligates each of us to $185,000.
We are issuing a demand for politicians to show the guts to either cut spending or raise taxes to meet the level of their spending.
We believe sticking this debt on our children is the height of immorality and cowardice.
We are taking a stand now in defense of our children.
We are conservatives which means we actually have children.

Burning up an Election

It is axiomatic that government wants to grow. Knowing that people are loathe to see their taxes raised, government workers' often unionize to see that whenever public dollars are spent, more of those dollars go to pay and benefits of the workers than to actual services. To do this, they support and oppose candidates for their governing boards. One public union, in a curious locale has quietly created perhaps the tightest lock on a board in the country, and has taken opposition to their opponents to an entire new level.

Chesterfield Missouri is a solidly upper middle class municipality in suburban St. Louis County with a media family income well over six figures. While one might expect their "Monarch Fire District" firefighters to make a good living, you would probably not expect their pay and benefits package to outstrip their patrons. The pay and benefits package for an individual firefighter is over $112,000 after five years. How did they do this? They have managed to win every single election over the last twenty years. As the affluent area prospered, they prospered. Rather than new equipment or new buildings, they demanded more pay and benefits, like a health insurance plan with plastic surgery benefits. Then it happened. A board member turned on them. In fact, every board member who turned on them was turned out of office, except one. They made sure he paid.

At a press conference today, an angry resident will reveal some startling documents. The firefighter's union needed a scandal. They created one with an audit of the health plan. Making bogus charges of criminal misconduct they called for the resignation the two citizen board members who opposed them; a doctor and a businessman who they had originally endorsed for office. The documents make reference to an investigative reporter as "in play" and reveal a complex plot to so harass the elected office holders as to "secure (their) resignations".

All told, the union has spent over $60,000 on the audit, over $70,000 taking out the last board member, and has so well-funded their current candidate that she is running ads on network TV running as a "taxpayer advocate" and, ironicly making reference to her opponents' pilot union membership. The plot appears to have worked. The physician, although fully exonerated has chosen not to run for a second term.

The legal bills to defend the board members from the audit and the criminal allegations has cost taxpayers upwards of $200,0000. The board in its fiduciary role, has sued the union's pr company in order to recover those tax dollars. The documents to be revealed today came from that discover process.

Stay tuned.

MONARCH RESIDENTS FOR RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Herman Kriegshauser
Phone: 314-223-4555
Email: herman63005@yahoo.com

UNION PLOT TO “SECURE RESIGNATIONS” OF OFFICE HOLDERS
Legal Exhibits Prove Residents’ Suspicions

CHESTERFIELD, MO March 24, 2009 – Herman Kriegshauser, member of the Monarch Fire Protection District Citizen’s Advisory Committee and 42 year resident, will hold a press conference at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 25 at Chesterfield City Hall (690 Chesterfield Parkway West, Chesterfield, MO) to present documentation that Monarch Firefighters and Paramedics conspired to subvert the electoral process by creating a campaign designed to force two well-respected elected officials to resign in order for the Union to take control of the Monarch Fire Protection District Board of Directors. This effort, which Mr. Kriegshauser recently uncovered, appears to have begun in December 2007 and it continues today.

Mr. Kriegshauser, who retired from his family’s funeral home business, came across this information as a result of a Sunshine Law request to see the Fire District’s files pertaining to a lawsuit it filed against Independent Insurance Auditing Service. The documents detail how the Monarch Firefighters and Paramedics Union hired a public relations firm and created a plan with a stated written objective to “Secure Resignations of Gans and Terschluse” (refers to Board President Richard Gans and Secretary Dr. David Terschluse).

Mr. Kriegshauser brought the documents to Board President, Rick Gans attention. Mr. Gans was aware the public relations firm was deposed as a part of the lawsuit, but he was appalled at what was contained in the documents. Gans said, “while I suspected all along that the Union was engaged in an effort to take control of the Board, I had no idea how far they went by hiring a professional P.R. firm to phantom write the Citizen’s Comments that were being delivered during Board meetings, or the Letters to the Editor that were supposedly written by concerned taxpayers. They clearly crossed the line”. Gans went on to say that Monarch firefighters and paramedics are among the highest paid in the country, yet they seem unsatisfied with current wages and benefits that exceed $100,000 for most and $140,000 for some. “At a time when the economy is suffering and tax dollars are so precious, the audacity of this Union to continue its efforts for double digit increases is absurd”.

Mr. Kriegshauser will provide copies of the documentation to those who attend the Press Conference on March 25. Additional information about Monarch Fire District wages and benefits may be found on the District’s official website at www.monarchfpd.org.

###