THE SUPREME COURT SAYS “YOU LIE:” White House Already Denying That Mandate Is A Tax. If you deny that it’s a tax, you admit that it’s unconstitutional. . . .Is this a heads I win, tails you lose story?
Thinking back on this, I think the impact of Universal Health Care on the body politic is more like the Federal Income Tax than like Social Security. That suggests to me that the approach of the advocates might have been wrong. Rather than a two thousand page bill that even then Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't understand, we needed a simple, straight forward Constitutional Amendment, which would have been the frame upon which various laws could have been hung. Take the 16th Amendment:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.We could have done the same with health care, but that would have been too easy, and to susceptible to the People, in their collective wisdom, rejecting it.
The Congress shall have the power to create a system of universal health care.Simple and straight forward. Instead we got the world's fattest Christmas Tree.
And, with a Constitutional Amendment, if we didn't like Universal Health Care we could repeal it. The Twenty-first Amendment:
Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.Didn't take two thousand pages.
And please remember that this isn't about the President. This is about the US Congress.
UPDATE: From the Althouse blog. Commenting on what White House Press Flack Jay Carney said about it not really being a tax, she noted the lawyer's catch phrase, If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck (or a tax). When the ACA lands back in court, which it will, it will be a duck… er, a tax.
Regards — Cliff
That certainly would be more straight forward and easy to understand but the reality is with specialn interests and lobbyists many of whom are former high ranking federal and elected officials that have access to policy makers (I always considered that influence peddling but I guess I am wrong) somethinas as simple as you suggest is not going to happen. Throw the one upsmanship of politics into the mix and something like that is DBA (Dead before arrival)
ReplyDeleteAnd THAT is the reason that nobody wanted an amendment to the Constitution.....then it would be up to the people......and heaven knows we sure don't want the PEOPLE of the US to decide what is good for them. No...instead we have a special class of people who have been divinely blessed with the sure knowledge that ONLY THEY know what is good for the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteAs for the ACA.....it is in....and it is a tax.....and so what....nobody is going to do anything to stop it...but lots of pretty speeches for and against it will be made.....
And quite soon we will join Greece.
I found it quite interesting and instructive that in the former USSR.....in the land of the dachas......there are many mansions of such magnitude as to make the mansions of Newport look like pup tents. A perfect metaphor for what is about to befall the US. The Russian populace were and are living in relative squalor.....with little material goods to comfort them......while the "ruling class" live in the same luxury they have always enjoyed....and always will.
The ACA is going to bankrupt the US and turn us into a third rate, third world country.....but the "entitled" will live on as if nothing has happened.