President Obama proposed a tax on your live Christmas Tree for this holiday season and at least one wag on Twitter said that it was a typical jizya tax from a Muslim a. Yes, the most Muslim-friendly president evah wants to tax Christians on their holiday fir. Nice.
Obama intended to initiate this tax of fifteen cents per live tree so that he could take that money and fund an advertising project for, uh,selling live Christmas trees. Yes, it’s that idiotic.
In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).
To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.
Am I saying Obama is really a Muslim? Who knows? But with this idiotic federal tax to be levied on Christmas trees, well, what did the Obama administration think people were going to taunt him with? Think he he tried to tax Muslims on the sale of birkas?
Even more idiotically this theft of our tax money (By that I mean Acting Administrator Shipman) claimed that this was “not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government.”
Yeah. Right!
As David Addington notes, “The Federal government mandates that the Christmas tree sellers pay the 15-cents per tree, whether they want to or not. The Federal government directs that the revenue generated by the 15-cent fee goes to the Board appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out the Christmas tree program established by the Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. President, that’s a new 15-cent tax to pay for a Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.”
A tax, is a tax, is a tax. I guess they don’t know the definition as of yet, that in itself is concerning!
Now, some extremist lefties out there have hastened to point out that this proposal was first floated during George W. Bush’s last term. And to that we can only say: who cares? Bush did not try to implement this idiotic thing. Obama did. It’s Obama’s Christian tax, not Bush’s,. time to get over Bush you leftist fools.
Fortunately for all of us, Obama did a back flip on this one and put a halt to the new tax and program in order to revisit the program to see if it is a good idea.
“USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action,” said White House spokesman Matt Lehrich.
Yeah, good idea, that.
Morons.
**Update**
This is why radio talk show host Michael Medved is no kind of conservative. He just argued on his radio show that this tax on Christmas trees is no big deal because it’s “only fifteen cents per tree.” MORON!
A principled conservative would be against this idiotic tax if it were one penny per hundred trees!!
The amount of this tax is immaterial to the principle of the matter. This money was going to go to fund a new federal program. THAT is what we should be standing against. The low rate of the tax is immaterial. There is no need for this tax, no need for this program to advertise Christmas trees (even if the Christmas tree industry wants the tax), and most especially no need for yet another bloated federal bureaucracy for Christmas trees!
As they say, there is nothing so permanent as a government program and this one would be just another government boondoggle that would grow and grow until it cost us billions a day like so many other useless government agencies.
That Michael Medved doesn’t see this and isn’t concerned about birthing another wasteful government agency and giving this agency new controls over our lives, well it pretty much shows that he — admittedly once a liberal — never really did become a conservative. With friends like Medved, who needs enemies.
