Morning Briefing
For January 30, 2014
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Small Businesses Don’t Add Jobs Because Government Makes Doing So Stupid
Monday,
I paid a couple of hundred dollars to the Internal Revenue Service for a
penalty on a penalty that in turn by law I should never have been
assessed.
I
employ myself, one full-time secretary, and one part-time paralegal
(part-time because my health insurance company requires that I give
every employee with over 20 hours of work per week insurance because
they want a big pool for Obamacare). I pay payroll taxes, two different
levels of unemployment taxes, business license fees, I could go on, and I
always pay on time; but paying these things takes away my stock in
trade, my time.
In December, I received a notice from the IRS
saying I was off some amount in the taxes I paid for the third quarter
of 2013. I looked at my records and said, No I’m not. I called and I was
told that yes I was, because although I’d used the electronic payment
system to make my payment (I’m required to do this by law) and had made
sure it would fund to the IRS by the correct date (the “settle date”),
the system had malfunctioned, and the IRS didn’t get my payment on time.
I protested that this wasn’t my fault and by law the settle date is
supposed to count as the date of payment, and I got some garbage about
the amount not being settled by that date.
Whatever.
I then asked why I had a thousand dollars in penalties for a payment
that was a handful of days late. (Again, it wasn’t late.) I was told it
wasn’t because of the days before the error was caught, it was because
of those days PLUS the time it took for them to catch it and send me the
notice, and penalties and interest run blah blah blah. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
Mark Murray Was Right. Just Not How He Meant It.
I
have long thought that most members of the Washington Press Corps go
home at night to a cardboard box full of wine and lip print stained
press clippings of Barack Obama. Mark Murray, the senior political
editor for NBC News, reinforces that image.
After the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Mark Murray tweeted:
"Obama’s ending on Remsburg wasn’t just a story about America — it also was a story about Obama. Nothing has ever come easy"
The President honored Sgt. First Class Cory
Remsburg for his heroism in Afghanistan. Remsburg, on his tenth tour in
Afghanistan, nearly died when a roadside bomb exploded. He suffered
brain damage, paralysis on his left side, is partially blind, and has
difficulty talking.
And Mark Murray of NBC News thought Barack
Obama was telling Cory Remsburg’s story to tell his own story. And you
know what? Mark Murray was right. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
Mitch McConnell, the Farm Bill and the Power of Logrolling
Yesterday, the House passed the Farm/Food Stamp bill boondoggle. Sadly, only 63 Republicans opposed it. The
bill locks in Obama’s food stamp regime, creates and expands numerous
Soviet-style agriculture subsidies and conservation regulations, and
authorizes more spending on the biofuels fiasco. House
Republicans got rolled in the conference committee by Senate Democrats,
yet almost 75% of the conference dutifully followed leadership. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
We are all capitalists
Shilling for minimum-wage increases is one of the laziest moves a desperate politician can make. President
Obama took it to a new level in his State of the Union address,
investing just enough effort to sharpen an embarrassing pander into
another weapon in his endless class warfare . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
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