Comments by Floyd Brown
Olympia Tea Party, Saturday June 27, 2009
Heritage Park, Olympia, WA
I want to start by thanking you for coming, I want to thank Jeff Morse and the other valiant organizers for making today happen.
When Jeff Morse called me and ask me to speak he wanted me to cover two important issues very much in the news. The first of those issues is Cap and Trade.
I like what Investor’s Business Daily said this week about the Cap and Trade Bill.
“The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact.
It’s what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, might call a “man-caused disaster,” a phrase she coined to replace the politically incorrect “terrorist attack.” But no terrorist could ever dream of inflicting as much damage as this bill.”
I n Cap and Trade….Cap indicates new limits on fossil fuel emissions. “Trade” refers to the mechanism by which those covered entities can buy or sell the rights to emit, called allowances. These allowances could be bought and sold like a commodity. Thus, if a regulated entity reduced its emissions more than required, it could sell its excess allowances to others at the market price, usually measured in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide.
For example, under the cap-and-trade bills, each utility would be granted a certain amount of annual emissions allowances based on past emissions or some other formula. If the utility could reduce its emissions below the allotted levels (e.g., by switching some of its power generation from coal to a lower-emitting fuel source), it could then sell its excess allowances to another utility that has not been able to reduce its emissions sufficiently.
The Obama administration, which is adamantly pushing the success of the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill, is creating something out of nothing in order to tax you.
Yesterday definitively proves Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are Liars…
You continue to believe them at your peril…
Journalists hate when I quote Barack Obama… They prefer to ignore the conflicts between his words and actions.
This is a direct quote from BarackObama.com…. It is his official position from the presidential campaign on taxes…
“Middle class families will see their taxes cut – and no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase. The typical middle class family will receive well over $1,000 in tax relief under the Obama plan, and will pay tax rates that are 20% lower than they faced under President Reagan. According to the Tax Policy Center, the Obama plan provides three times as much tax relief for middle class families as the McCain plan.”
Yet this week Barack Obama spent much of the week lobbying nervous members of his own party to dramatically raise taxes through the Cap and Trade mechanism.
Last night by a 219-212 margin Democrats’ passed the largest tax increase in American history. They called it cap-and-trade… They should have called it Cap and Tax… It will Cap America’s economic growth and it will tax the middle class. Those making under $250,000 a year will pay dearly for this latest Obama scheme.
The plan will cost American families $3,100 per year, a figure based not on some conservative report, but based on a 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study of the Cap and Tax proposal….
Let me repeat this so you hear me correctly …. This bill will cost the average American family $3100. The publicly articulated goal of the bill may be to reduce so called green house emissions, but it is actually a scheme to fleece the taxpayers.
We have for the last three years been in a cycle of global cooling. Many respected scientists have stepped forward and debunked the concept of global warming so thoroughly that the proponents of this bill renamed it climate change. If the weather changes then they are correct and need to raise your taxes…
Well, the truth is the weather changes everyday… Some days it rains, some days the sun shines… Some days are hot and some are cold… But one fact never changes and that is the insatiable appetite that the governing elite in America have for your money.
In their opinion you have too much of it and they need to lighten your wallet to help themselves and their friends to the fruits of your hard work and accomplishment.
Our greatest economic competitor, China has scoffed at the entire climate change issue and is ignoring all calls to curb emissions. The costs that will face American industry to comply with these new rules are ruinous. Millions of jobs will be moved abroad and our competitive position vis-à-vis China and others is greatly harmed.
You and your children and grand children will be poorer as a result of this legislation.
Finally, to pass this massive tax increase while America is in a recession is like putting a 50 pound pack on an marathon runner. The recession will be longer and more devastating as a result of the Obama and Congressional actions. They are stalling the recovery, turning the Bush recession into an Obama depression.
This plan is “the biggest tax increase in history” and that the people in control now are not liberals, they are socialists masquerading as liberals.
And they prove it with the next proposal they plan to vote on next and that is Obamacare.
Imagine waiting for a year to have cancer surgery while the malignancy spreads – and then be told, “Sorry. You waited too long. Go home and die.” It happens in Britain and Canada because they have socialized medicine.
Now imagine a federal bureaucrat possessing the power to choose your doctor, tell doctors what treatments they can prescribe and which tests they can run. They decide at what age you are no longer eligible to undergo dialysis or receive an organ transplant or a CAT scan, even treatments as simple as antibiotics.
Are you ready for a law that forbids you from consulting a private physician for better treatment or to get a second opinion — even if you’re willing to pay for the service yourself?
These are all features of health care plans introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives. Obama recently announced: “After decades of inaction, we have finally decided to fix what is broken about health care in America. We have decided that it’s time to give every American quality health care at an affordable cost.”
Obama is using the excuse that millions of Americans are uninsured to take over America’s health care system — and he will destroy it.
The health care “crisis” is a myth. Medical costs are high, but this is a result of the best care in the world and current over regulation which inhibits true competition.
There’s no health-care crisis in America. Improvements can be made, but “According to ‘Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,’ a Census Bureau report published last August, of the 45.6 million persons in the U.S. that did not have health insurance at some point in 2007, 9.7 million, or about 21 percent, were not U.S. citizens. Also among the uninsured are 17 million Americans who live in households where the annual income exceeds $50,000; 7 million of those without coverage have incomes of $75,000 a year or more.”
“Many of the uninsured are young and healthy (40 percent are between ages 18 and 34) and at this point in their lives, particularly in this economy, choose to put their dollars elsewhere.”
Apparently those who are legally in this country, and are involuntarily uninsured for an extended period of time, constitute a small number of people. Moreover, the involuntarily uninsured are not forced in this country to go without medical treatment.
“The notion that the uninsured are without health care is bogus, as well. They consumed an estimated $116 billion worth of health care in 2008, according to the advocacy group Families USA.”
So based on a fabricated crisis, Obama panics and is attempting to hand doctors, hospitals, and patients over to an army of bureaucrats.
Senator Richard Shelby recently said that President Barack Obama’s proposed health care plan is the “first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known.”
Dick Morris captured the progressive nature of the plan this way: “Now that the cameras have been put away and the media is no longer watching their secret emerges: They are going to cut medical costs by cutting medical care… These decisions will not be medical but financial. They will not be based on a doctor’s opinion of what his or her patient needs, but a bureaucrat’s and an accountant s opinion of what the new health care system can afford.
“And you will not be able to bypass their rulings and pay for this care yourself… What we now call a private fee for service will metastasize into a bribe.”
Everything Obama’s is doing moves the U.S. economy closer and closer to financial collapse. We stand on the brink of the precipice, staring down into the abyss. Three of the most recent estimates, place the “true cost” of Obama bailouts at anywhere from $3.2 trillion to $12.8 trillion.
Perhaps that’s why Obama solemnly stated a short time ago, “We’re out of money.”
Still, Obama wants to shove this money-guzzling, freedom-killing program down the throats of the American people. The dollar is perilously close to losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. Other nations think we’re about to go under.
We’ve been borrowing from China for years. Now, there’s talk that soon China won’t extend us credit because our economy won’t generate enough wealth to meet our payments.
In the final analysis to pay the bill, Obama will do as England and Canada; he will restrict care to the elderly and the sick. Premature death is the most efficient way to curb medical costs, and Obama’s plan will take America down this dark and deadly road.
This week Barack Obama hosted a prime time special in support of the bill with ABC News. This marks his 1000th TV appearance is 157 days in office. And it’s now officially a toss-up; who’s on TV more – Barack Obama or the Sham Wow Guy?
