Barack Obama’s Obamacare problem, in one tax form line.

And it’s a sockeldanger.

Line 6[1]: it’s official and the federal government has to admit it. The individual mandate is a tax. That means that changing it even by a penny is – no fooling, seriously, this is not something that you can just executive-order away – only possible via an Act of Congress. This will not happen (Obamacare was designed to keep Republicans out of the loop for as long as possible) which means that the current very low penalties for noncompliance are never going to get any higher.

Shoot, at the rate things are going paying the fine and getting insurance on your own will be a pretty good deal. Assuming, of course, that the Supreme Court doesn’t make the whole thing moot by declaring that the individual mandate is invalid in federal exchange states*.

Moe Lane

*Yup, Halbig. If the government can’t provide subsidies to a state that doesn’t have an exchange, effectively the mandate goes away for that state. Dang but the Democrats are bad at writing legislation, huh?

6 thoughts on “Barack Obama’s Obamacare problem, in one tax form line.”

  2. Considering the fact that Obama wants us to impeach him ( to turn out progressive voters)

    And considering the fact that we have a very unpopular Congress, then whats to stop Obama from actually raising illegally a tax via EO?

    I mean there are enough idiots in this country who wouldn’t know the *historical* significance of such an act and would probably approve of him doing it, at least until the tax hit their wallets.

    We’d shout “Tyranny!” ( and that is straight up what Tax via EO would be) and they’d say “You wingnuts need to calm down he ‘just’ raised taxes”

    And the media and the Democrat party would be all on board in acting as if we are the unreasonable ones.

    1. …
      Unless he suspends the 2016 election, the next Congress and President would .. very much enjoy using their new-found powers and precedents to *demolish* the proggies’ century of progress through the institutions.
      .
      I have run across .. don’t think it’s on a web site so I can’t put up a link .. a proposal of something like 20 EOs that the next GOP POTUS could write that would be worse than the end of the world for Proggie dreams.
      .
      Mew

  3. And the great thing is that the Fourth Circus decision that went the other way essentially said, “Maybe it means what the plaintiffs say, maybe it means what the government says, who knows? But the government view is plausible’. So President Perry can just order the IRS to rule the other way regardless of what Congress does.

    1. That would be very bad… We don’t want an uber President, if Rick Perry decided to go it alone, we would be saying that what Obama is doing currently was perfectly okay (and it isn’t).
      –
      What we should be hoping is that the Supreme Court will side with the DC court ruling.

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