Is the individual mandate in ObamaCare a tax? No, said Nancy Pelosi. No, said DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, even if the IRS is the only agency that can enforce it. No, said Jay Carney, or at least, “it is not a broad-based tax.”
Of course, Mitt Romney called it a tax — eventually. Yesterday, his opponent in the election weighed in on the issue, and … have we reached a consensus?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThblNGcA7sk[/youtube]“By the way, if you’ve got health insurance, you’re not getting hit by a tax,” President Obama said. “The only thing that’s happening to you is that you now have more security because insurance companies can’t drop you when you get sick.”
That sounds so sweet, you’d never guess that the CBO estimates that the government will raise $54 billion in revenue from this tax in its eight years after the mandate takes effect, almost all of it from the middle class. (Remember, that’s exactly what the CBO projected we would save through federal tort reform in malpractice cases over a decade, which Democrats rejected as too extreme.) Revenues increase rather than decrease during that eight-year run, too. Why? Many employers will stop offering health-care coverage, throwing employees into the individual policy market.
I guess that the $54 billion will appear out of Obama’s stash!
Middle-class earners will face the choice of paying for expensive individual plans or paying a
finetax instead.But at least it isn’t a ”broad-based tax.” (Jay Carney)
I feel so much better.
NOT!
Those expensive individual plans are the ones Obama calls ”Cadillac plans” and adds a 40% tax on top of!
Of course Obama waived his UNION cronies from this.
Must be nice….
Anyway, all of this just ignores all the other 20 or so new ObamaCare taxes that hit the middle class the hardest.