I’ve got a question: Just how stupid are all you reporters? No, that’s not a rhetorical question. Whether you want to call the ACA health care mandate a tax or not is mainly a semantic point. It’s a penalty or tax or perhaps a tax penalty on people who refuse to purchase health insurance, even after they received subsidies that make it possible. But Republicans are now saying it’s the ‘biggest tax increase in history’ — either of America or the universe of whatever. But this is demonstrably false.
The Congressional Budget Office says the mandate penalty will raise $27 billion between 2012 and 2021. $27 billion over a decade. Anybody who cares to can do the math. But if you want to call it a ‘tax increase’ — which is debatable — it’s clearly one of tiniest ones in history.
I’d be curious how many interviewers are (or are not) stopping folks who make this claim and pointing out this fact. Send me examples.
Still have questions about the politics and policy and even the legal ins and outs of the Health Care decision. Our Senior Capitol Hill Reporter and lead health care correspondent did a detailed Q&A with readers on Thursday answering all your questions. Check it out here.
I think Paul Ryan just said God wants us to repeal ‘Obamacare’.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows increased support for ‘Obamacare’ in the aftermath of last week’s Supreme Court ruling while also showing an intensification of opposition.
The IRS is taking a hard look at political ‘charities’ like Crossroads GPS.
Scientists expected to announce Wednesday that they have discovered trace evidence of the elusive Higgs boson particle, the AP reports.
Post columnist Marc Thiessen goes into full Lord of the Flies mode on John Roberts, embraces new legal doctrine of stare defucit.
A month ago, conventional wisdom had it that the Bain attacks on Mitt Romney were somehow failing terribly — notwithstanding the fact that they’ve been key parts of every other campaign Democrats and Republicans have run against Romney going all the way back to 1994. And yet all of a sudden, the Obama campaign is going full outsource/Bain attack on Romney at every opportunity. So they think it’s working great. New polling suggests they may be on to something. And in the most telling development, in the days leading up to the surprise Supreme Court ruling, the Romney campaign itself is mounting a mammoth pushback, signaling more clearly than anything that they think it’s working too.
So what happened? Read More
You may have noticed that a strange telepathy pandemic has swept DC since the Supreme Court upheld the ACA. Its most potent vector is this CBS report that John Roberts changed his mind weeks into the deliberations and decided to join the liberal wing of the Court. Now everyone pretends to know why Roberts did what he did.
At the very least, we now know pretty conclusively that a couple people in the Court (clerks? Justices?) believe Roberts flipped, and are pretty upset about it. But let’s stick for now with the interpretation everyone else deems conclusive and say that Roberts had a change of heart. Read More
In today’s episode of The Set-Up I look at the deeply unconvincing claim that Barack Obama could have gotten single payer health care reform in 2009 if only he’d put his mind to it.