While we’re busy listening to President Obama demand a $1.6 trillion tax increase on some people as the price for disarming part of a $1.2 trillion tax bomb aimed at other people, let’s not forget that he’s already detonated a $1.058 trillion tax warhead on all of us: ObamaCare.
As the House Ways and Means Committee noted last summer, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision upholding ObamaCare, it contains 21 distinct tax increases, “a dozen of which target Americans earning less than $200,000 per year for singles or $250,000 per year for married couples.” In other words, the Sainted Middle Class.
And we’re not talking about the shape-shifting extra-Constitutional tax/penalty “individual mandate,’ either. That’s a mere $55 billion of the total. These are good old-fashioned cash grabs, no different than the $2,000 bite from Taxmageddon that “working Americans” are supposed to be upset about. Among the larger items is a surtax on capital gains that we delicate middle-class flowers will be encountering if we try to sell our houses.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) mentioned another ominous tax increase from ObamaCare on Friday: “ObamaCare raises taxes on middle-income families, employers and investors. It hikes taxes on people with no health insurance, people with too little insurance and people with too much. Taxes are even going up on pacemakers, prosthetics, and other vital medical equipment. The ObamaCare tax hikes are a big part of the fiscal cliff. Stopping them should be part of the solution.”
Pacemakers, prosthetics, and other vital medical equipment? That doesn’t sound like the fashionable trinkets rich people buy and stuff into vaults, along with the dusty piles of gold coins and rubies that Obama wants to take from them. Those are items vital to the quality of life for a great many poor and middle-income people. $20 billion worth of new taxes are heading for the industry that produces them, on top of the same increased labor costs that ObamaCare is dropping on every employer. Those costs will be passed along to the customer, as all business taxes are.
How in the world can it make any sense to leave these ObamaCare taxes out of any serious “fiscal cliff” discussion? Especially since ObamaCare’s costs are already spiraling out of control, contributing to the deficit problem that Obama’s tax increase proposals are supposed to solve.
But no, the “fiscal cliff” is discussed the same way “global warming” is: a rich bureaucrat rolls up in a gigantic limousine and tells the people driving mopeds and sub-compacts that they’re killing the Earth by burning too many fossil fuels. When it was time to fund Barack Obama’s health-care agenda, money was no object. Cost projections full of wild fantasies, outright lies, and a staggering number of question marks were accepted as serious components of the legislation. The President and his party didn’t worry about anyone’s taxes going up, middle-class or otherwise. The whole thing was jammed through in hasty midnight sessions, so quickly that no one even had a chance to read the parts of the bill that were actually written down.
When it’s time to talk about tax reform and rate reductions, however, suddenly these big spenders become penny-pinching misers. We can’t have a “tax cut” – how would the American government, the rightful owner of all property and wealth, “pay” for that? We can’t risk a tax increase on the beloved middle class? It’s all such miserable theater. We’re supposed to forget about the last trillion in taxes every time Big Government wants another trillion… even as the previous tax hikes are still being implemented, on the backs of people who will never be seen as “millionaires,” by even the most tortured definition.
