David Online

“On the day millions of Americans were freezing their collective backsides off, Democrat Henry Waxman, our new Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman, announced that Congress would fast-track climate change legislation. Waxman said, inaction on the climate issue is causing uncertainties that make it more difficult to emerge from the recession.”

In other words, according to Waxman our “inaction” to address global warming has had a fundamental impact on the economic downturn. Waxman joins the Al Gore fear-mongering chorus line chanting doomsday fantasy scenarios of the “supposed” global warming taking place as we are once again experiencing record-setting cold in so many parts of the nation.

If you think energy is expensive now, wait until Waxman gets his way. Playing on the public’s fear of “global warming,” we are about to almost certainly see a nationalized energy policy and price controls through cap and trade and carbon credits.

“The late economist and journalist Henry Hazlitt once wrote that those who attempt “to lift the prices of particular commodities permanently above their natural market levels have failed so often, so disastrously and so notoriously” that no one admits to wanting to try it. Then again, in those heady days, the Energy and Commerce chairman’s job was actually assisting Americans with their energy needs, not making it more expensive.”

The day Waxman delivered his statement, the National Weather Service issued a warning for Chicago about wind chill somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to 40 below zero. In Maine, citizens are expecting something around 40 below zero. And Iowans were warned that temperatures could drop as far as 27 below zero.

Apparently Sen. Henry Waxman expects these pitiful, frozen American citizens to pay higher energy prices to shield themselves from Arctic cold in the name of global warming.

 The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday to raise federal tobacco taxes and expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The bill proposes to increase the Federal tax on cigarettes by $0.61 a pack over the current $0.39 bringing the total to a $1.00 a pack.

The $33 billion would raise federal taxes on cigarettes, cigars and other tobacco products to help fund the expansion. House Democrats have enthusiastically backed the expansion saying it will bring health care coverage to an additional four million lower-income kids.

What the House Democrats failed to mention was that this tax burden will fall on the shoulders of the poor and lower income folks – not the middle class and not the wealthy. 

The vast majority of smokers in the United States have historically been the poor – the very same group this legislation is intended to benefit. Taxing cigarettes then becomes nothing more than a “bait and switch” regressive tax on the poor. In other words, what the poor think they are getting as free or greatly reduced cost heath care for their children, will cost them instead in disproportionately higher Federal taxes.

To get this “free” health care, the new tax would add an additional $222.65 per year Federal tax burden for a single-parent smoking household; assuming the parent smokes only one pack per day. This is almost a week’s take-home pay for a minimum wage worker. If both parents are smokers then it equals to two weeks of income per year just to pay the additional Federal tax increase.

Taxing the poor is political cowardice on the part of the Democrats. It is also ethically and morally bankrupt to use Federal taxes as a tool of social engineering. It is a use of government force to alter personal, non-rights violating behavior to punish people for engaging in activities that do not violate rights. And yet, that is exactly what this tax does.