These new healthcare taxes will burden our economy even further when we can least afford it. How will that help the average American? How will this healthcare plan help us if we have no jobs? Are the politicians in Washington DC on drugs or something? The key to understanding their insanity is how they have manipulated this bill so as to make it appear to be deficit neutral as President Obama has demanded. What they have done is to precook the books; they will begin the taxes 5 years before the services begin. In this way it is, or might be, deficit neutral. But what of the future, what about the next ten years? Will they somehow stop time for five years to collect the taxes for the next ten years? Will we by then be able to use some kind of a time warp to collect taxes before, during, and or after we need them? I’m confused, and I think that they are too. jbranstetter04 Taxes Proposed to Pay for Health Care Reform The US Senate recently released its long-awaited proposal for a government-run hostile takeover of the entire US health care system. Predictably, it includes a barrage of higher taxes to pay for the bill’s immense price tag. An important addition to the list of tax hikes included in the Senate bill was an increase in the Medicare portion of the payroll tax. The current Medicare tax is 2.9 percent, paid half each by workers and employers. The proposal in the Senate bill raises this to 3.4 percent for workers making more than $200000 a year ($250000 for joint …