Obama administration: Health-care mandates are taxes after allby Ed MorrisseyHot Air Jun. 18, 2010 |
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Recall, if you will, that Barack Obama scolded George Stephanopoulos nine months ago for consulting a dictionary to call the health-care mandate a tax. It became one of the more popular Obamateurisms of 2009, but served as an unequivocal statement that the Obama administration would not defend the health-insurance mandate as a tax in order to get a court to approve of it. Obama even sounded offended by the suggestion: OBAMA: No. That's not true, George. The -- for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.My, how times have changed … now that Obama has signed the bill into law (via The Blog Prof): In order to protect the new national health care law from legal challenges, the Obama administration has been forced to argue that the individual mandate represents a tax — even though Obama himself argued the exact opposite while campaigning to pass the legislation.Suddenly, the health-insurance mandate is a tax. I guess someone must have given Obama a Merriam-Webster dictionary as a gift. This means that Obama has broken two pledges. First, Obama insisted that he would not attempt to use the tax argument to get approval from the courts. Second, Obama just signed the largest middle-class tax increase in years, if not ever, by mandating not just the purchase of insurance but of specific kinds of insurance. Some estimates show that over 51% of all Americans will have to change their plans in order to meet the new requirements, and that’s not to pay less, either. Not only that, but the Obama administration is prepared to make the argument that it passed a massive tax increase in court. Open up the dictionary, Mr. President, and find the word hypocrite. See a familiar face next to it? |