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Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, the chief congressional advocate of taxing some employer-provided benefits to help pay for an overhaul of the U.S. health system, says any change should exempt perks secured in existing collective- bargaining agreements, which can be in place for as long as five years.

The exception, which could make the proposal more politically palatable to Democrats from heavily unionized states such as Michigan, is adding controversy to an already contentious debate. It would shield the 12.4 percent of American workers who belong to unions from being taxed while exposing some other middle-income workers to the levy.

“I can’t think of any other aspect of the individual income tax that treats benefits of different people differently because of who they work for,” said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington research group that often criticizes Democrats’ economic proposals. Edwards said the carve-out “smacks of political favoritism.”

Baucus, a Montana Democrat, is proposing to tax Americans whose health insurance is valued at a higher rate than what is offered to federal employees. About 40 percent of insured Americans have costlier benefits, and Baucus has said he is trying to set the level at which taxes would be imposed high enough so fewer people are affected.

GORDON wrote:"Cap & Trade Bill" gets closer to being passed.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archive....779.php

Also known as the "Global Warming Tax," or the "Starve and Freeze Bill," this will send our energy bills higher in an already bad economy.

It's like they weren't trying to destroy the economy fast enough, they need to throw this in the fire, too.

When even the Slashdot crowd is against a so-called environmental bill, you know it's bad news.

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's begin with that vote Friday night in the House, this vote on climate change legislation, very close, 219 to 212. Democrats say it's a major step forward for energy independence, to create green jobs, to control global warming.

But you know the Republicans are saying it's going to cost Americans jobs, going to send jobs overseas. And most important, they say it is a huge tax. And on that they have some backup from one of the president's supporters, Warren Buffett.

Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WARREN BUFFETT, CEO, BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY: I think if you get into the way it was written, it's a huge tax and there's no sense calling it anything else. I mean, it is a tax. So it -- and it's a fairly regressive tax.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you answer that? Republicans say this is the defining vote of 2008. They're going to use that in the 2010 elections.

The new rules will go into effect in 2012, and will save up to 594 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and save consumers up to 4 billion annually through 2042.

Standards will include decreasing electricity use by general service fluorescent lamps by 15% and incandescent reflector lamps by 25%. These lamps represent 37% and 7% of lighting energy use respectively.