Obama administration trying to tax our Christmas trees

Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
November 10, 2011

The economic geniuses in the White House are at it again. When there are no more free market-driven jobs left on its domestic shores, you can always rely on the Federal Government to obey industry lobbyists and create a few new tax payer-funded consultancy jobs in the process.

To cover its out of control spending program and stimulus debt, the Obama regime have resorted to hitting Americans with a new 15-cent stealth tax on all fresh Christmas trees. The tax applies to all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year.

As with all federally mandated stealth taxes, the consumer normally ends up paying double or triple the levy, as businesses use new tax announcements as an excuse to increase their own profits. This one is a tax on the growers, so naturally it will be passed on the seller, and the customers.

All this in order to support the White House’s new government marketing program, intended to “improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees”, but according to White House public relations operatives, Obama’s Christmas tax is not happening this year due to a massive uproar in anticipation of its release.

White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said to ABC News, “I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama Administration is not taxing Christmas trees.”

Known as the ‘Christmas Tree Tax’, this latest borrow-spend-and-tax brainwave was announced by Obama’s Department  of Agriculture (USDA), all in an effort to improve the Xmas tree’s flagging PR profile.

In effect, the growers will get some benefit from the federal marketing campaign, as well as a possible bump in profit for the sellers. This really amounts to a type of bailout for the Xmas tree industry. In essence, this translates in a few new, well-paid consultancy pork jobs in and around the beltway. Such is the trend in Obama’s Washington.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

But its not the first time the Obama has caved into Capitol Hill lobbyists and decided that the American taxpayer should pick up the bill for a certain industry’s national marketing activities.

Only this past January we saw Obama’s brilliant Pizza Bailout, when the USDA decided to funnel no less than $12 million dollars into the marketing budget of national chain Domino’s Pizza.

This cheesy bailout came because of an insider organization called Dairy Management, a commercial marketing arm of the USDA. Dairy Management represents the cheese industry, who’s biggest clients are firms like Domino’s.

So the White House attempted a large-scale marketing drive to promote the new Domino’s item with “40% more cheese”… processed cheese. If Domino’s sales go up, dairy industry profits go up. Naturally, pizza lobbyists expect that the Obama government will be there from now on to make sure the tax payer are chipping in to make that happen.

Again, with this stealth pizza bailout, likely funded via some stealth tax, it essentially creates a few more tax-payer-funded highly paid consultancy jobs for lucky insiders who, with their lobbyist agents, pushed for the pork program to begin with.

As main street America continues to be gutted by the borrow-spend-tax policies of a junkie government addicted to paper, our Federal government feels obligated to create more federally funded jobs out of thin air.

For any Occupy movers and shakers reading this article, what you are witnessing here is not “capitalism”. There is no such system in the US. It’s called crony capitalism, and it’s this type of operating procedure which is destroying developed economies in America and Europe.

This type of crony social capitalism should not surprise Americans who watched as the US government already gave away $trillions of dollars over to the banking cartel already, as well as an open window for trillions more.

Expect many more Federal government rent-seeking schemes over the coming year – and let’s not forget, from the President who cast himself as a man not beholden to special interests.

In the end Obama was forced to let go of his Christmas tax. Still though, his US federal government appear to possess an insatiable appetite for levying new taxes to fill the US Treasury – all the while austerity and inflation continue to ravage the working man and woman on the street.

Ho, ho, ho.

This article was posted: Friday, November 11, 2011 at 12:14 pm

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