After campaigning extensively on no tax increase for anyone making under $250,000 a year, then insisting the money paying for health care wouldn’t be paid for by a tax increase, it seems the president finally admits to lying. This came in the New York Times, on July 18, 2010, buried on page 18 in an article by Robert Pear, “Changing Stance, Administration Now Defends Insurance Mandate as a Tax.”
When Barack Obama was running for president and insisting health care would not be paid for by a tax increase some Republicans, including Senator John McCain, called him on it. It was all denial, denial, denial. In September 2009, when President Obama was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News show “This Week”, Obama said, “for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”
When the health care bill with a mandate to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty was passed, Democrats denied creating a new tax. Now that tax is being defended by Obama as “an exercises of the government’s power to lay and collect taxes.”
As the conservative talk show hosts were saying for the past two years, Obama will raise taxes on the middle and lower income Americans.
The Obama administration has to defend the requirement to purchase health insurance as a tax in court against a lawsuit filed by 20 states, including Colorado. In order for health care to avoid a lawsuit as an unconstitutional act, it must be called a tax. As a tax, the “penalty” uninsured Americans will have to pay cannot be challenged. And because it’s a tax, it’s been deemed constitutional by Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School.
The question is, will other mainstream media bury this story, or will Fox News be the only ones talking about the tax increase, coming soon to you?
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