Last night, in bitter disappointment, I posted that our President lied to us when he claimed that Obamacare wasn’t a tax. Scott Erb and Nickgb called shenanigans. The claim is that when Obama was claiming that his law wasn’t a tax, he believed it. Only later did it turn out that he would be wrong and the court would strike down the law based on the commerce clause and uphold it under congresses ability to tax.
Certainly valid points. But what is Obama’s administration saying now?
The White House and the Obama campaign today insisted that the individual mandate in the president’s health care bill is a “penalty,” not a tax, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the law under Congress’ taxing power.
“For those who can afford health insurance but choose to remain uninsured, forcing the rest of us to pay for their care, a penalty is administered as part of the Affordable Care Act,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One today.
“You can call it what you want. If you read the opinion, it is not a broad-based tax,” he said, stressing that the “penalty” would affect 1 percent of the population, based on CBO estimates. “It’s a penalty because you have a choice. You don’t have a choice to pay your taxes, right?”
Obama isn’t going to call this a tax. It IS a tax, that’s the law. As he sends his administration and his campaign out saying that it isn’t it does two things:
- That Obama knew this was a tax when he was working to pass this law. The words know and the words then certainly are beginning to sound the same.
- That he’s lying now.
It’s settled. This new law is a tax hike, rumor has it it’s the biggest tax hike in history. In that lens , Obama is going to have to answer to that.
