-By Warner Todd Huston
Soak the “rich.” That’s the plan. In fact, that is always the plan with tax and spend Democrats. This time it is a new “surtax” on Americans making over $250,000 a year (or $350,000 per couple) to pay for Obamacare.
Ominously, the plan has a hike mechanism right at the outset as Charlie Rangel (D, NY), head of the House Ways and Means Committee, has inserted language that will raise the tax higher if they don’t get as much money as they want with this first dip into the rich folk’s wallets. If anyone thinks Democrats will imagine they’ve gotten enough the first time and that the hike trigger doesn’t need to be pulled… well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
So, who will this hit? Can anyone doubt that it will be doctors themselves? After such a raid into American’s paychecks, it will be doctors that will find that they are being taxed in order to pay themselves further reduced rates by government reimbursements through this new healthcare system.
This will tend to drive even more doctors out of the business and make the shortage of doctors ever more acute. But it won’t just drive doctors out of being doctors. It will also affect the millions of small businesses out there.
Small business owners will find their success being penalized at increasing rates and this, in turn, will causes them to fire employees and will also dampen their interests in expanding or starting new businesses.
At a time when our economy is in the biggest downturn for decades, Congress and Obama are floating plans that will further kill the economy putting a recovery even further off into the future.
Tax alternatives
It seems that Democrat squabbling has closed the door on some of the other tax ideas that were being floated.
For instance, Big Labor has already warned Obama to abandon the idea of taxing healthcare benefits. Even Teamster bigwig James P. Hoffa said that such a tax “would touch off a stampede to the public plan, undermining the entire system.” This is also a tacit admission that the public option is a tenuous idea, but Hoffa won’t ever admit to that.
But even this surtax outrage is being opposed by the 40 members of the Blue Dog Coalition. This group of center-left Democrats also oppose the public plan feature of Obamacare and have already forced the left-wing leadership back to the drawing board on some aspects of the plan.
Finally, if the healthcare industry thinks they are going to get a say in this bill, they are fooling themselves. As I said yesterday Democrat lawmakers couldn’t care less what “agreements” that Obama has made with industry lobbyists and representatives. Obama’s showy summits, czars, and grand policy discussions have absolutely no bearing on what Congress intends to do with their policies for a nationalized healthcare system.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece by Kimberley A. Strassel buttresses the point I made yesterday quite well and is worth a read. In it, Strassel wonders why the healthcare representatives are so foolish as to believe they have any meaningful say in the debate when it is painfully obvious that they don’t?
And for the final word today, we go right back to the first sentence. It’s soak the rich time once again for the left-wing, proto socialist Democrats in Congress. And their avarice and hatred of the so-called rich, their class warfare will further hurt our economic recovery as well as materially alter for the worse our national character.
Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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