But I’m sure the Ministry of Truth will do it’s best to diminish, dismiss and deny it even now.
That is that Mandatory Health Insurance is a TAX.
Shocking revelation, I know…
On poor people no less!!
CBS Sept 2009: President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don’t would not amount to a backhanded tax increase. “I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said.
“My critics say everything is a tax increase,” Mr. Obama said on “This Week.” “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”
ABC: The—for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore . . .” In other words, like parents talking to their children, this levy—don’t call it a tax—is for your own good.
Mr. Stephanopoulos: “But you reject that it’s a tax increase?”
Mr. Obama: “I absolutely reject that notion.”
President Obama said in his not quite State of the Union address that Americans earning less than $250,000 would pay “not one dime” in new taxes.
Well, it’s time to reveal Lie #4,362. The Big Whopper.
The one all of us “racist” “teabagger” “idiots” and “terrorist” warned you about.
WASHINGTON — When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.
In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.
Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.
While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.
“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy. Nowhere does Congress cite its taxing power as a source of authority.
They knew they were lying. They didn’t care. Because the end justified the means.
And the Mainstream Media was either brain-dead stupid or in on the lies. Period.
Under the Constitution, Congress can exercise its taxing power to provide for the “general welfare.” It is for Congress, not courts, to decide which taxes are “conducive to the general welfare,” the Supreme Court said 73 years ago in upholding the Social Security Act.
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, described the tax power as an alternative source of authority.
“The Commerce Clause supplies sufficient authority for the shared-responsibility requirements in the new health reform law,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “To the extent that there is any question of additional authority — and we don’t believe there is — it would be available through the General Welfare Clause.”
The law describes the levy on the uninsured as a “penalty” rather than a tax. The Justice Department brushes aside the distinction, saying “the statutory label” does not matter. The constitutionality of a tax law depends on “its practical operation,” not the precise form of words used to describe it, the department says, citing a long line of Supreme Court cases.
Orwell is smiling on you, Mr President and AG Holder.
Masters of Doublespeak.
Orwell on “The Party” of Big Brother: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… – (Orwell, New American Library, 1981, p35)
Moreover, the department says the penalty is a tax because it will raise substantial revenue: $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In addition, the department notes, the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, and people must report it on their tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.”
2009: What’s more, the agency is limited in the actions it can take to enforce compliance. “Congress was very careful to make sure that there was nothing too punitive in this bill,” {IRS Chief} Shulman said. “There’s no criminal sanctions for not paying this, and there’s no ability to levy a bank account or do seizures or [use] some of the other tools” available to the agency for enforcing laws.
If necessary, the IRS will levy fines against individuals who fail to purchase adequate insurance and collect them though tax return offsets. But the agency’s “first line of defense is education,” he said.
Because the penalty is a tax, the department says, no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund.
Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the new law, said, “The tax argument is the strongest argument for upholding” the individual-coverage requirement.
Mr. Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill,” Mr. Balkin said last month at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization. “This bill is a tax. Because it’s a tax, it’s completely constitutional.”
Mr. Balkin and other law professors pressed that argument in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in one of the pending cases.
Opponents contend that the “minimum coverage provision” is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s power to regulate commerce.
“This is the first time that Congress has ever ordered Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”
In reply, the administration and its allies say that a person who goes without insurance is simply choosing to pay for health care out of pocket at a later date. In the aggregate, they say, these decisions have a substantial effect on the interstate market for health care and health insurance.In its legal briefs, the Obama administration points to a famous New Deal case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court upheld a penalty imposed on an Ohio farmer who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use.
The wheat grown by Roscoe Filburn “may be trivial by itself,” the court said, but when combined with the output of other small farmers, it significantly affected interstate commerce and could therefore be regulated by the government as part of a broad scheme regulating interstate commerce.
But it will bring prices down: Lie #4,264
The Democratic co-chair of President Obama’s fiscal commission said Wednesday that the president’s health care bill will do very little to bring down costs, contradicting claims from the White House that their sweeping legislation will dramatically impact runaway entitlement spending.
“It didn’t do a lot to address cost factors in health care. So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, speaking about the new health law, which was signed into law by Obama this past spring after a nearly year-long fight in Congress.
Esrkine Bowles is one of the two stooges who will anounce AFTER the mid-term election that all is crap and we have to have massive Tax increases in order to save us all, including likely, the VAT.
And if the republicans are in charge of at least one side or both of Congress it will be even more there fault!
And Obama is going to, “Well, I have to do what the report says…”
It’s the ultimate Dog & Pony show.
Just keep that in mind.
Bowles, speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that even with the passage of Obama’s legislation, health care costs are still going to “really eat us alive” unless dramatic changes are made. The commission will submit recommendations on how to fix America’s long term fiscal problems to Congress in December.
Bowles’ point will be amplified Thursday when a conservative think tank releases a paper arguing that Obama’s health plan “is not entitlement reform,” at an event intended to highlight an alternative plan for reforming health care spending that is the brainchild of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican.
James C. Capretta, a former White House budget adviser on health care to President George W. Bush, will present the paper for the Galen Institute at an event on Capitol Hill with Ryan, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top conservative economist.
Even as many on Capitol Hill are talking about addressing Social Security spending, Capretta writes in the 19-page paper that Medicare is the real problem.
Most Democrats and Republicans agree, Capretta says, that the 30 to 35 million seniors in Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) insurance program are “the engine … pulling the rest of the health system down the tracks at an accelerated and dangerous rate.”
And who just got recess appointee to the job of head of Medicare, a NHS Single-payer Health Care rationing lover.
No coincidence there mind you.
Most FFS participants pay nothing out of their own pockets for health care, and hospitals and doctors are incentivized to provide them with as many services and tests as can be loosely justified.
But Capretta says in the paper that the Obama health bill is not reform because it attempts to stop price inflation and inefficient care through top-down government control rather than bottom-up consumer demand.
“When attempts have been made in the past to steer patients toward preferred physicians or hospitals, they have failed miserably because politicians and regulators find it impossible to make distinctions among hospitals and physician groups based on quality measures that can themselves be disputed,” Capretta says.
Capretta goes on to say that Paul Ryan’s plan would move Medicare recipients from defined benefits to defined contributions, in which “cost-conscious consumers choose between competing insurers and delivery systems based on price and quality.”
“Beneficiaries would get to decide which insurance plan they want to enroll in. If the premium were more than the amount they are entitled to from Medicare, then they would pay the difference. If it were less, they would keep all of the savings,” Capretta says.
“Millions of otherwise passive Medicare participants would become active, cost-conscious consumers of insurance and alternative models for securing needed medical services,” Capretta writes. “Cost cutting innovation would be rewarded, not punished as it is today.”
White House officials pointed to recent blog posts by White House budget director Peter Orszag, who said that “if implemented effectively, [Obama’s health care bill] can play an important role in moving toward a healthier fiscal future.” (Daily Caller)
Welcome Big Brother Obama and Big Mother Michelle’s New and Improved IRS:
If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare. What, you’re not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency’s new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already “greatly taxed”—pun intended?—”by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public,” like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for “the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.” And without “sufficient funding” it won’t be able to discharge these new duties.
That wouldn’t be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance “as required by law” and collecting penalties from Americans who don’t. Companies that don’t sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will “involve nearly every division and function of the IRS,” Ms. Olson reports.
Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn’t figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.
Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farms and one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.
Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical “tax gap” of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance.” Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.
Meanwhile, the IRS will be inundated with useless information, because without a huge upgrade its information systems won’t be able to manage and track the nanodetails.
In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new “burden” on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find “better ways to structure this reporting requirement.” In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.
We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.(WSJ)
On Friday, Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. His plea to fellow Democrats to pass a $22.9-billion fix for Medicare doctors’ fees reveals the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
Remember the health care issue? Well, the fiscal consequences of the socialized medicine scheme enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress just two months ago are already beginning to snowball.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was one of the key architects and advocates of Obamacare. He was back on the House floor on Friday delivering an urgent plea to fellow Democrats that inadvertently—or, perhaps, unavoidably—revealed the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
It was supposed to save the taxpayers money, remember? “This legislation will lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades,” Obama said when he signed the bill.
On Friday, Waxman declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. He went to the House floor to “urge” his colleagues to vote for a bill that includes $102 billion in new federal spending and would add $54 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years — $25 billion of it in the few months remaining in this fiscal year.
Why did Waxman believe this new borrowing-and-spending was necessary?
“It’s absolutely critical to do this if we are going to keep doctors in Medicare and keep the promise to Medicare beneficiaries that they will have access to physicians’ services,” said Waxman. “This provision will provide a moderate increase in physicians’ fees, 2.2 percent for the rest of the year. If we don’t act, doctors’ fees will be cut by 21 percent from where they are today. This would be unconscionable.”
It would not merely be unconscionable. If the 21-percent cut in Medicare fees for doctors—that, in fact, legally took effect on June 1 — is allowed to stand, many doctors in this country will simply stop seeing Medicare patients. They will not be able to afford it. The cost to them of serving their patients will exceed what they are paid. Their profit margin will be swept away.
To make precisely this point, 12 national surgeons’ associations—including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons and the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery—sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter last Wednesday warning her what would happen if Medicare doctors’ fees are slashed as they are scheduled to be under current law.
“These continued payment cuts, rising practice costs and a lack of certainty going forward, make it difficult, if not impossible, for already financially challenged surgical practices to continue to treat Medicare patients,” the surgeons’ associations told Pelosi.
The letter pointed the speaker toward the results of a survey of more than 13,000 physicians done in February by the Surgical Coalition, a group of more than 20 medical associations. The survey asked these doctors what they would do if Medicare fees were slashed by the scheduled 21.2 percent.
Twenty-nine percent said they would opt out of the Medicare system entirely. Almost 69 percent said they would limit the number of appointments they would take from Medicare patients, 45.8 percent said they would start referring complex Medicare patients to other physicians, 45.3 percent said they would stop providing certain services, 43.8 percent said they would defer purchasing new medical equipment and 42.7 percent said they would cut their staff. Almost 4 percent of the doctors said they would close or sell their practices.
Why did Congress plan to slash the doctors’ Medicare fees in the first place? It didn’t. In the past, the majority in Congress has routinely enacted budget bills that fraudulently assumed that on some future date the federal government would dramatically slash the Medicare fees paid to doctors, knowing that before that date arrived the majority would pass “emergency” legislation postponing the cuts to some still-future date. The majority in Congress does this so the long-term deficits caused by their spending bills appear to be smaller than they actually are.
As originally proposed, Obamacare would have ended this practice, permanently setting Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors at the true anticipated level. But the Congressional Budget Office determined that doing so would have added $208 billion to the cost of Obamacare over 10 years, forcing the CBO to declare that Obamacare added to the deficit rather than reduced it. That would have cost Obamacare votes on the House floor and quite possibly defeated the legislation.
So the congressional leadership stripped the “doc fix” out of Obamacare and left it to another day.
Waxman went down to the floor last Friday to declare that day had come. Unfortunately, for him, the Senate had already left town for its Memorial Day vacation. So, the current fix will have to wait until it returns.
Even then, the fix only accounts for $22.9 billion of the $102 billion cost of the bill the House did pass on Friday. Most of the rest of the money is for extending unemployment benefits and special targeted tax breaks.
The $22.9 billion fix for the doctors’ fees—if passed by the Senate—would only last through September 2011. Then Congress will presumably do it all again—or let the Medicare system collapse.
And they did.
In the meantime, Obamacare is supposed to cut half a trillion in spending from elsewhere in Medicare, while Obama’s budget—not counting the $54 billion in new debt included in this bill—is expected to add $9.8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.(IBD)
And then there’s still more on the “Financial Reform” bill related to the IRS:
“Small businesses are America’s job creators and essential to our nation’s economy,” Roberts said in prepared remarks. “Under the new healthcare law, small businesses will be hit with a costly tax reporting provision that will increase the cost of doing business at a time of economic uncertainty.”
Beginning in 2012, the law states that businesses, tax-exempt organizations, and state and local governments must submit a separate 1099 form for every business-to-business transaction totaling more than $600. The impetus behind the requirement is help the IRS better enforce the tax law by forcing companies to disclose whom they do business with.
Several organizations, including the IRS watchdog The National Taxpayer Advocate, have questioned how effective this requirement will be on enforcement.
The new mandate applies to everyday purchases, like shipping costs, supplies, even Internet and phone service. The senators argue this will overburden companies. The Taxpayer Advocate questions the IRS’ ability to handle all the documentation.
“Unless corrected, this time-wasting mandate of 1099 filings on common purchases needed to do business, will stifle economic growth and job creation while the IRS will be handed a paperwork nightmare,” Roberts said.
The senators contend the requirement will affect 40 million businesses nationwide.
“I have heard from many Kansas small businesses and farmers, already burdened with government bureaucracy, that these new reporting requirements will waste time and negatively impact their bottom-line,” Roberts said.
Abortion, anyone?
As reports are coming out that Pennsylvania is receiving $160 million from the Department of Health and Human Services to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that will fund abortions, we are seeing, yet again, that the Obama Administration will say and do anything to pass their liberal agenda — ignoring public opinion along the way…
LIES: “You’ve heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion – not true. These are all fabrications.” — President Obama on August 19, 2009
D*MN LIES: “The executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.” — White House Statement on March 21, 2010
STATISTICS: 67 percent of Americans oppose funding abortions with public funds under the health care bill. — Quinnipiac University Poll, January 14, 2010
As pundits have commented in recent weeks, and many of us have realized, you need to watch what the President really does, not listen to what he says, as the two are often in vast contrast of one another. As you can read above, nowhere is this truer than on the issue of abortion.
Back in March, when the offer to sign an Executive Order was made, many pro-lifers questioned why the order was needed after President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Secretary Sebelius had been saying for months that no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions. On the day of the vote, I personally spoke on the House floor about how an Executive Order has no effect of law and cannot override the clear intent of a statute, as well as on how an Executive Order is only a piece of paper. Now that we know how little the President values his word and that he is comfortable violating an Executive Order, we are only left to wonder what other secrets are lurking for us in the dark. (The Hill)
Remember, it was abortion that was the very last hurdle that Obama had to jump over to get his power over life and death.
He promised to Federally ban it.
He said Health Care Reform wasn’t tax.
The Stimulus will create 3 Million Jobs. (not “save or create”)
I said at the time he was lying.
I got called a racist so many times I could have paid off my house with the money if I got paid for it.
Saying this President is lying when his lips are moving is like saying the sun will come up tomorrow.
It’s an absolute certainty.
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”-Orwell
Thank you, Big Brother and Big Mother and Big Sis…
Anyone got a crate of Tea handy…
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