Did somebody say ‘trickeration’?
John Roberts was right: of course Obamacare was a tax. And not just a tax, but a massive new welfare program balanced on the backs of the kulak middle class in the guise of “health care reform.” Like all modern Democrat-led expansions of government, it came as a wolf in sheeple’s clothing, a nasty measure passed by stealth with malevolence aforethought. Hello, suckers!
Those Americans who didn’t get health insurance last year could be in for a rude awakening when the IRS asks them to fork over their Obamacare penalty — and it could be a lot more than the $95 many of them may be expecting.
The Affordable Care Act requires those who didn’t have insurance last year and didn’t qualify for one of the exemptions to pay a tax penalty, which was widely cited as $95 the first year. But the $95 is actually a minimum, and middle- and upper-income families will actually end up paying 1 percent of their household income as their penalty. TurboTax, an online tax service, estimated that the average penalty for lacking health insurance in 2014 will be $301.
And that’s just the beginning. Unless the GOP wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party can actually stop lying to the voters who put it in control of Congress and repeal this monstrosity, the greatest deception in American history will become a permanent, punitive feature of the dwindling quality of life in the land we used to call America.
For this, we can thank not only Mr. Fundamental Transformation, Maerose Prizzi and Sen. Pat Geary, but the legendary low-information voter, who a) thought Obamacare was supposed to mean free health-care and b) never dreamed the tax — er, “penalty” — was going to hit him. The lo-fos must have missed the bit about the IRS enforcing the measure.
“People would hear the $95, quit listening, and make an assumption that that was what their penalty was going to be,” said Chuck Lovelace, vice president of affordable care for Liberty Tax Service. “I think that a lot of people will be surprised when they get in there and find out that their penalty is [based] on their household income.”
The penalty is designed to prod Americans to buy insurance and the penalty for not having it is scheduled to rise considerably: to a $325 minimum or 2 percent of income in 2015, and to a $695 minimum or 2.5 percent of income in 2016.
It’s all in a day’s evil for the criminal organization masquerading as a political party, a gang that has been at war with the American experience since Aaron Burr, one of the founders of Tammany Hall, shot Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and got away with it. Their naked lust for the expansion of their own political power never stops, never sleeps, never quits. Screwing you is, quite literally, their life’s work.
Now even some Democrats are professing to have second thoughts. (They don’t really — they’re just embarrassed the fraud is is not quite working out the way they’d hoped.) The unlovely, soon-to-be-new face of the conspiracy, New York’s senator Chuck Schumer, was first out of the box, followed quickly by former Iowa senator Tom Harkin; Schumer said the Marxist Dems’ first priority should have been — stop laughing! — helping the middle class, while Harkin opined that health-care reform should have been done “the right way” (i.e. “single-payer,” i.e. completely government controlled).
Over at the Weekly Standard, William Voegeli has a long piece called “Liars’ Remorse” about the pickle the dwindling band of Democrats now finds itself in, electorally speaking. As the monstrous nature of Obamacare becomes ever clearer, even to the lowest of low-information, easily bamboozled, gimme voters, they are faced with a rare situation: their cover has been, at least temporarily, blown. And for this we can thank the gift that keeps on giving, the true id of the Democrat Party and its contempt for the intelligence of the American people: Jonathan Gruber. As Voegeli writes:
The voters’ cognitive deficiencies are a retrospective problem for Democrats, as Tomasky and Hiltzik point out, but also a prospective one. They mean that new government interventions cannot be secured through candor and clarity, but require guile and subterfuge, a position made clear by MIT economics professor and Obama administration adviser Jonathan Gruber. Explaining, in 2012, why the Affordable Care Act taxes insurance companies, which will pass along the costs to policyholders, rather than taxing the insured directly, Gruber said, “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”
In 2013 he told a University of Pennsylvania audience that the ACA “was written in a tortured way” so that neither the Congressional Budget Office nor the public would see its individual mandate to buy heath insurance as a new tax. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber concluded. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”
When, days after the 2014 midterm elections, Gruber’s remarks were publicized, Democratic politicians and journalists scrambled to denounce them, and Gruber himself apologized in congressional testimony for his “glib, thoughtless, and sometimes downright insulting comments.” Disdaining and deceiving the people are indeed affronts to democracy, but are not the only transgressions against American self-government. Gruber’s arrogance was gratuitous, but the deceptions he smugly praised served a Democratic purpose: convincing people that government interventions that can bestow formidable benefits while imposing negligible costs are, despite sounding too good to be true, low-hanging fruit ready to be harvested.
Watch and listen to the cocksure arrogance of this whiny little creep as he gloats about how the administration put one over on the gullible American public:
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But not to worry — there’s more where that came from. In his upcoming State of the Union address, Obama is “expected” to propose even more freebies and goodies to his core constituency: wastrels, layabouts, bums and moochers. Here’s The Hill, salivating over the prospect of more government action:
The White House wants President Obama to play the part of Robin Hood at Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Obama hopes to use the big speech to remove a blemish of his presidency: an economic recovery that has left wage growth behind.
Free community college. A $175 billion tax cut for the middle class. Faster, cheaper broadband internet. A week of paid sick leave. Discounted mortgages. Obama wants to move forward with all of these populist proposals for the poor and middle class, and he wants to do so by taking from the rich in the form of higher taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street.
Few of the proposals are going anywhere with a GOP Congress, but the White House sees Obama’s penultimate State of the Union as the president’s last, best chance to lay down policy markers for the next two years —and to frame the 2016 battle for the White House. It’s also meant to ensure Obama remains relevant for as long into his presidency as possible.
Now, you know this is a lie because the Democrats’ lips are moving, but also because no one has been more snuggled up to Wall Street than President Robin Hood. The Democrats are now the party of the very, very, very rich and the indigent and the indolent: they don’t give a damn about the middle class except as it affects them at the ballot box.
Forget the details about Obamacare, whether it works or it doesn’t (it doesn’t); whether it was a noble intention (it wasn’t); whether it can be fixed (it can’t). Instead concentrate on the principle behind the thing: a breathtaking Leftist power grab, so long sought and finally achieved. It’s not the end; it’s only the beginning, unless it is ripped out, root and branch before it’s too late. Over to you, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.
Yeah, right…
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