#Obamacare Watch: John Roberts’ Revenge.

Lemme translate this:

A reform aimed at getting more [young people] to buy coverage would have to make it even more stupid for them to remain uninsured. Some reformers would do so with a firm individual mandate backed with a stiff penalty. But the Supreme Court last year said a legal requirement to buy coverage would be unconstitutional and transformed Obamacare’s mandate and penalty into a tax on the uninsured. And since forcing people to buy a product they don’t want doesn’t make for great politics, that penalty (now tax) was in any case set much too low to fundamentally change the financial calculation for most people.

Roughly: Do not assume that John Roberts is on Barack Obama’s Christmas card list.  This is one devil of a pickle that the Supreme Court has gotten the Democratic party into; the President is not exactly in a position to raise taxes on anybody, let alone young people.

Moe Lane

7 thoughts on “#Obamacare Watch: John Roberts’ Revenge.”

  1. The IRS works because of voluntary compliance. Obamacare may undermine this to such an extent that the gray economy will grow to rival that in many Southern European countries and we will be left with a bureaucracy without a tax base.

    1. I am not certain, Freddie, whether you have the tense right in your first sentence.
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      “The IRS worked” may be more accurate.
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      I was aware of a lot more tax avoidance than there was under Bush, and all metrics I saw showed the “underground economy” booming .. *BEFORE* Lois Lerner.
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      I do not see how this gets fixed without at least several dozen apparatchiks going to prison.
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      Mew

      1. Lots of people these days see not paying taxes as civil disobedience. Funny how the left always thought that concept would work *for* them.

      2. You are right but we have yet to meet the tipping point.
        Bureaucracies are running amok.

        1. Yes, but they’re doing so on borrowed money.
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          Once they’re back to paying Carter-era usurious rates and inflation cannot be hidden .. it’s game over.
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          Mew

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