"I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12, 2008. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
He repeatedly promised "you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.
Truth is such a dang hard thing, especially for con law professors who promise to go through bills line by line:
In the most contentious exchange of President Barack Obama’s marathon of five Sunday shows, he said it is “not true” that a requirement for individuals to get health insurance under a key reform plan now being debated amounts to a tax increase.
But he could look it up — in the bill.
Page 29, sentence one of the bill introduced by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) says: “The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax.”
And the rest of the bill is clear that the Finance Committee does, in fact, consider it a tax: “The excise tax would be assessed through the tax code and applied as an additional amount of Federal tax owed.”The bill requires every American, with few exceptions, to carry health insurance. To enforce this individual mandate, the Senate Finance Committee created the excise tax as a penalty for people who don’t have insurance – and it can run as much as $3,800 a year per family.
The House bill also refers to the penalties for not carrying insurance as a tax. It calls for a “tax on individuals without acceptable health care coverage” and amends the tax code to implement it.
The questions from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos highlighted a politically dangerous new aspect of the health reform debate for Obama – as critics from Republican leaders to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say his reform proposals amount to a middle-class tax increase. Obama promised during the campaign that Americans earning less than $250,000 a year would not see any tax increases from an Obama administration.
The wheels are coming off the bus, couple this with CBS and others finally catching up to the President's nonsense and its clear the stirrings of a watchdog media might be forming.
Hey. In my opinion, if you make a promise you should also fulfill it. However, if you want to make reforms it is highly possible that you will need extra resources for them. That is why you start to thinking about how to raise them. Increasing of taxes is one of the ways. But there could be also different solution - e.g. health care reform is necessary. Canada could be used as a model. The current system costs 15% of GDP, while at least 15% of the population is not covered at all. Canada spends only 10% of its GDP, covering 100% of its population. Regards, Lorne.
ReplyDelete