Saturday, July 17, 2010

NAT'L HEALTH INS A TAX!

Another campaign promise President Obama has broken. Details in this "New York Times" article Changing Stance, Administration Now Defends Insurance Mandate as a Tax. The reason the Obama Justice Department has decided to admit National Health Care is a Tax is simple. Twenty states have challenged the right of the Government to require National Health Insurance under the "Commerce Clause" of the Constitution, and they were going to loose. But calling it a Tax (which we all knew it was all along) makes for a stronger argument.
[I]n court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
So much for keeping Campaign promises. Here is the crux of the matter.
Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.
Now this presents a real problem for the Democrats and especially for President Obama. Remember this statement by President Obama?
“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”

When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
Congress took a large step with the language of the Health Care Bill to insure we would be convinced that this was not a tax. Look at the following language in the provisions of the legislation.
Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy.
Congress discounted the possibility and knew the public would not like a tax on anyone except the rich - those making over $250,000.00 per year. Now that the Obama Administration through the Justice Department have decided to defend National Health Care as a TAX (something Obama did not want to do), we all have confirmed what we knew in our hearts. National Health Care is a Tax on everyone, just like Cap and Trade will be if passed.

The Democrats, including President Obama, have been dishonest about what National Health Insurance is.
Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the new law, said, “The tax argument is the strongest argument for upholding” the individual-coverage requirement.

Mr. Obama "has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill,” Mr. Balkin said last month at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization. “This bill is a tax." [Emphasis Mine]
If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck...

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