**EXCLUSIVE** Senate Minority Leader: No Tax Hikes

With conservatives across the country concerned about a rumored Republican cave-in in Washington, D.C. over tax policy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is speaking out. Read his lips: no tax hikes. McConnell said in an exclusive statement to Martinez392 Reporter: One issue I’ve never been conflicted about is taxes. I wasn’t sent to Washington to raise anybody’s taxes to pay for more wasteful spending and this election doesn’t change my principles. This election was a disappointment, without doubt, but let’s be clear about something: the House is still run by Republicans, and Republicans still maintain a robust minority in the Senate. I know some people out there think Tuesday’s results mean Republicans in Washington are now going to roll over and agree to Democrat demands that we hike tax rates before the end of the year. I’m here to tell them there is no truth to that notion whatsoever. The media has already taken House Speaker John Boehner out of context to claim that he is willing to cave on raising tax rates. In point of fact, Boehner has spoken about closing tax loopholes while lowering tax rates as part of a balanced approach to spending to avoid the much-dreaded fiscal cliff. Both House and Senate Republicans are united in their opposition to tax hikes.

Obama Meets Possible Holder Replacement Deval Patrick For Dinner

Speculation is running rampant that Attorney General Eric Holder will step down from the Obama administration – and now, President Obama is meeting with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, widely considered a possible Holder successor. More broadly, Patrick is considered a possible future Democratic presidential candidate. Obama is scheduled to have dinner with Patrick tonight. Patrick is one of the most stridently liberal politicians in America. He has vetoed a ban on using EBT cards to buy pornography, tattoos, jewelry, guns, and bail money. Seriously.

Emotional Businessman Blames Obama For Coal Layoffs

Election Consequences: Decline of Doctor-Owned Practices

With the re-election of President Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act's regulations will continue to roll out through 2014. There will be new rules for how the states and the federal government will run the new health insurance “exchanges.” Insurance companies will have their rules regarding premiums they can charge and the customers they will be required to sign up, regardless of medical history. As for individual Americans, we will be required to present evidence of a “government-defined” health insurance plan to the IRS when we file our tax returns. But, what about doctors, specifically those who own their own practices? Doctor-owned practices are places where health care is provided, but they are also small businesses, operated by small-business owners and entrepreneurs, the doctors themselves. Doctors who own their own practices have the same costs as other small businesses: rent or mortgage, staff salaries and benefits, utilities, computers, equipment, furniture, etc. As small businesses that have suffered along with others under the first Obama administration, there is no reason yet to believe they won’t suffer more under the second, particularly when Obama and the Democrats want to increase taxes on those who make $250,000 or more. For those health care providers who have practices with many employees, the issue of the ObamaCare employer mandate to provide health insurance for them is another factor of the decision regarding whether a practice is sustainable. For health providers who rely on health insurance as third party payers, lower reimbursement rates over the years have greatly impacted small business practices. Most Americans would never accept a job in which their prospective employer told them they would get paid less and less each year they work for the business. Yet, health providers agree to this all the time in the system we have had prior to the era of ObamaCare, a system that is equally dysfunctional. As a result of lowered Medicare reimbursements, for example, more doctors will now be denying care to our seniors. The $716 billion that ObamaCare steals from Medicare is the reimbursement funding that is supposed to have gone to Medicare providers. Gone with the re-election of Obama. For those health providers who are “fee for service,” meaning that patients pay them directly for services without insurance as another intervening element of the transaction, the Obama economic decline has led to high unemployment and, consequently, less customers who can pay fees. Health providers who are small business owners have experienced significant drops in income and the reality that they must pay for office expenses with what would have been personal income. Mental health providers are often in this category, having left insurance-based practices because of the extremely low reimbursement rates by health insurance companies in this specialty area. Doctoral level mental health providers could once have a successful business because many patients preferred to pay them privately to protect themselves from having a mental health diagnosis on their health insurance records. However, with so many Americans out of work, many fee-for-service practices are barely surviving. With the new rules and regulations of ObamaCare, most will close. The fact is that the costs of complying with all the ObamaCare regulations makes it difficult to sustain doctor-owned practices. With the government now mandating that doctors use electronic records, so that information is easier to share, the costs to implement the requirements will belong to health providers. Under ObamaCare, many, if not most, doctors will be forced into hospital employment or Accountable Care Organizations (ACO). That means they will no longer be their own bosses, no longer make the decisions about their individual practices and, consequently, no longer have the same level of responsibility for the health care that is delivered. As we have seen in most bureaucratic systems that are reliant upon the government in some way, the buck always stops someplace higher up. Perhaps some doctors will like being a “company man or woman,” because they won’t have to worry about complying with all the new ObamaCare regulations and administrative issues in their own practices. Instead, they can just show up, treat healthcare problems, collect a salary, and let someone else worry about the business end of it. Like other small businesses, doctor-owned businesses are facing a forceful blow. Health care business owners can either spend all the money and time required to comply with ObamaCare -- money and time taken away from their personal incomes and further investment in their business practices -- or close up shop and become just another health care worker on the assembly line that is life.

Why Obama's rising tax plan will not solve America's fiscal crisis

More than half the American voters Tuesday support higher taxes for those individuals making more than $250,000. And President Barack Obama has indicated he intends to make good on his campaign promise to hike taxes for the very wealthy. "In the long term [Obama] is going to need to raise taxes on more than just the rich," Len Burman, a professor of public affairs at Syracuse University and a co-founder of the bipartisan Tax Policy Center, said in an interview with The Daily Ticker. "The budget problem isn't going to be solved without broader-based tax increases, preferably done in the context of tax reform and also serious entitlement reform. We're not going to be able to solve this on the tax side alone." In fact, Burman said if the White House and Congress would agree to raise the capital gains rate, higher taxes would not be necessary for any income group. “The problem with a low tax rate on capital gains is not that it allows Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett to pay very low taxes but that it creates this huge opportunity for tax sheltering," he notes. "There's a whole industry that's devoted to coming up with these schemes. [Raising capital gains rates] could make the tax system more progressive and allow for lower tax rates.” One likely remedy for revenue-raising will be to take the current dividend tax rate of 15 percent and hike it 5 to 10 percentage points, Bill Gross, Pimco' co-CEO, said in an interview with "Squawk Box." His company oversees the largest bond fund in the world and has $1.8 trillion assets under management. "Obama ran on a higher-tax agenda," Gross said during the interview. "Marginal income taxes go from 35 to 40 (percent), capital gains from 15 to 20, dividends from 15 to who knows what...so they could go high, high and higher." As a result, higher dividend taxes make those companies less attractive and thus take the stock market down 5 to 10 percent, he said. That's "the ultimate danger here for the stock market," he said. "Dividends are sheltered in 401(k)s, they're sheltered in pension funds. At the margins investors pay dividend tax rates. To the extent that you raise them from 15 to, say, 25 (percent), that implies in terms of equaling after tax rates another 5 to 10 percent down in terms of stock prices. We've been very spoiled for the last 10 years." If that happens and the payroll tax holiday goes away for 160 million Americans who earn a pay check each week, the reduction in consumer spending could be more than the already anticipated $120 billion for 2013. The payroll tax holiday, first approved as a temporary imitative in 2011, is set to expire at midnight New Year’s Eve. If Congress allows the measure to expire, payroll taxes will jump two percent beginning with the first pay check of 2013.

FDA's New Cigarette Warning Labels

The Labels Are On The Below

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today unveiled nine new warning labels cigarette makers will have to use by the fall of 2012. In the most significant change to U.S. cigarette packs in 25 years, the FDA's the new warning labels depict in graphic detail the negative health effects of tobacco use. (AP Photo/U.S. Food and Drug Administration)

The 10 States That Restrict Personal Freedom

The 10 States That Restrict Personal Freedom
The debate about who is “free” in the United States is older than the Bill of Rights. Whether people are better off with laws designed to protect them but limit their freedom, or with very few laws, allowing them to fend for themselves, clouds the issue.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed the George Mason University’s biannual “Freedom in the 50 States” report authored by the school’s Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank. According to the report’s authors, they “explicitly ground [their] conception of freedom on an individual-rights framework. In [their] view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and properties as they see fit, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.” As a result, a more “free” state in the study will have more liberal social policies and more conservative economic policies. The report considered “a wide range of public policies, from income taxation to gun control, from homeschooling regulation to drug policy.

The Freedom report ranks individual liberty of state residents based on three major categories: fiscal freedom, personal freedom, and regulatory freedom. Fiscal freedom involves issues including state taxes, government spending, and wages. Regulatory freedom involves the impact that local laws have on personal economic choices and property, including labor regulation, mandatory health insurance, and eminent domain. Personal freedom involves individual choice, such as the right to drink, smoke and shoot guns.

Is your state among the most restricted when it comes to freedom? Read on to find out.