Responding to the massive BP oil spill, Congress is getting ready to quadruple—to 32 cents a barrel—a tax on oil used to help finance cleanups. The increase would raise nearly $11 billion over the next decade.

The tax is levied on oil produced in the U.S. or imported from foreign countries. The revenue goes to a fund managed by the Coast Guard to help pay to clean up spills in waterways, such as the Gulf of Mexico.

The tax increase is part of a larger bill that has grown into a nearly $200 billion grab bag of unfinished business that lawmakers hope to complete before Memorial Day.

KETK

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Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said that provisions in the new financial regulatory bill violate privacy rights by allowing the government to collect any financial information it wants from any financial institution it wants.

Privacy concerns stem from the new information-gathering authorities the bill would give to the federal government, allowing it collect any information, including records from Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) and the addresses of depositors, from any financial institution at any time.

One such entity, the Office of Financial Research, is empowered to collect “any data or information” from any financial organization or federal regulator. One of those regulators, Shelby pointed out, would be the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP), which is empowered to collect a person’s ATM receipts and the addresses of depositors.

“The Democrats’ new bureaucracy poses a threat to our privacy,” Shelby said, “Under section 1022 of their bill, the new bureau would collect any information it chooses from businesses and consumers including personal characteristics and financial information.

Full Report – CNS News

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Illegal immigration has long been ignored. People are seeing that the drug cartels, the domestic assaults, the DUIs, the Leaving the Scene of an Accident, the identity thefts – it’s all not worth whatever supposed labor benefit we are being provided from an influx of uneducated people who have no regards for our laws.

Get control of the border and get serious about removing the 20 million that are here already.

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An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.

Why did these tax code revisions get included in a health-care reform bill?  Welcome to Washington.

The idea seems to be that using 1099 forms to capture unreported income will generate more government revenue and help offset the cost of the health bill.

The notion of mailing a tax form to Costco or Staples each year to document purchases may seem absurd to small business owners, but that’s not the worst of it, tax experts say.

Marianne Couch, a principal with the Cokala Tax Group in Michigan and former chair of a citizen advisory group to the IRS on small business and self-employed tax issues, thinks the bigger headache will be data collection: gathering names and taxpayer identification numbers for every payee and vendor that you do business with.

Full Report – CNN Money

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The United States’ unemployment rate remains high at 9.7 percent. States are in the unfair position of having to take immigration law into their own hands. Americans are angry about the overspending in D.C., increased taxes, an aggressive health care bill, and proposals for “cap and trade.” But despite all of these looming issues, what legislation does Congress plan to tackle today, April 29? H.R. 2499 (Puerto Rico Democracy Act of 2009), a piece of legislation that may allow Puerto Rico to become a state.

The bill requires Puerto Rico to hold an election on a referendum that reads, “Do you want to maintain the status quo?” Now, if it seems strange that a bill related to potentially adding a 51st state to our union does not once mention the word “statehood,” it should.

The referendum is purposely written this way to bring about a desired result. Legislators know what the answer would be if Puerto Rican voters are asked to vote on statehood, since in the past 40 years, Puerto Ricans have eagerly voted against becoming a state three times. The most recent vote took place in 1998, when voters were provided with the following four choices: a.) statehood; b.) sovereignty; c.) modified commonwealth; d.) none of the above. Of the choices, the response was overwhelmingly choice “D.”

Full report – The New American

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