The Classic Liberal Blog

The bill that became law this week to save us from alleged Armageddon, is an abomination of everything America stands for!

Despite flooding Washington with phone calls and emails to tell these people who work for us to vote "NO", the Political Class went ahead and robbed American taxpayers of their hard-earned money, socialized a large portion of our financial system, and porked it up like there's no tomorrow.

Highlights from "The Fleecing of American Taxpayers Act":

• $6 million welfare for manufacturers of kids wooden arrows.
• $192 million welfare for Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum manufacturers.
• $128 million welfare for auto-racing tracks.
• $33 million welfare for corporations operating in American Samoa.
• $10 million welfare for film production.
• $233 million welfare for fisherman affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.
• Welfare for wool research.
• Welfare for wind, refined coal, geothermal heat pumps, and marine (waves) energy.
• $800 billion offering of "energy bonds".
• Welfare for "cellulosic biofuels" and "carbon dioxide sequestration."
• Welfare for "new qualified plug-in electric-drive motor vehicles."
• Bicycle commuters get tax breaks,.
• Regulations aimed at "residential top-loading clothes washers."

But wait, there's more!

• The Internal Revenue Service gets new authority to conduct undercover operations.
• Lets the IRS give information from individual tax returns to any federal law enforcement agency investigating suspected "terrorist" activity, and share it with police, the CIA and the National Security Agency.  The information that can be shared includes "a taxpayer's identity, the nature, source, or amount of his income, payments, receipts, deductions, exemptions, credits, assets, liabilities, net worth, tax liability, tax withheld, deficiencies, over-assessments, or tax payments, whether the taxpayer's return was, is being, or will be examined or subject to other investigation or processing, or any other data received by, recorded by, prepared by, furnished to, or collected by the Secretary with respect to a return."
• Requires a "carbon audit" of the tax code.
• Creates a national finger-print registry.
• Authorizes the Treasury Department to create a so-called Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as a separate insurance fund.
• It's possible for a bank to buy $100 billion of bad debt--perhaps in the form of sub-prime mortgages that are becoming quickly worthless-- declare bankruptcy, and sell it to the Treasury Department for $120 billion, or $200 billion.
• Authorizes the Treasury to "guarantee" home mortgages, effectively becoming a co-signer. If the home owner stops paying his or her mortgage, taxpayers will make their payments.
• The Treasury Department can also eliminate a "reasonable" amount of a home owner's mortgage debt.
• Says that the administration can purchase and hold $700 billion of assets "at any one time." This means the Treasury could buy up buy up $700 billion in 2008, sell those assets off gradually over the next year (of course at a loss), and repeat the same process in 2009. In other words, this will cost taxpayers significantly more than $700 billion.

Don't you just LOVE politicians?

Before you vote this November, ask yourself one question:

What would Thomas Jefferson do?