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Who knew a key issue in the presidential campaign would be why a penalty is called a tax if you force freeloaders to buy health insurance? While every country in the civilized world provides its citizens with health care, we in America argue over the equivalent of how many fairies are on the head of a pin (I counted them one time and the surprising answer is none).
If comedian George Carlin were still alive, he would have to shorten his list of seven forbidden words to just two — tax, and in California, foie gras (is that one word or two?). If you are the son or daughter of a politician, you can curse, do drugs and have wanton sex, but if you should ever utter the word “tax,” your video games will be confiscated and your mouth washed out.
The prohibition on the word “tax” in public discourse is the one example of American exceptionalism that comes most quickly to mind, except, perhaps, for Bristol Palin’s reality TV show. Let me hasten to add that no one likes to pay taxes, even your columnist, as he schemes with President Barack Obama for a socialist takeover. The Beatles sang of the evils of “Taxman” and taxes are the root cause of why so many Wall Street CEOs wet the bed. But it was Ronald Reagan who really cast the word “tax” into ill-repute.
Poor George H.W. Bush or “41” as we affectionately refer to him (since the Supreme Court made the wrong son the 43rd president), learned the hard way when lip readers everywhere held him to his no new taxes pledge. (Incidentally, I refuse to refer to the Supreme Court as SCOTUS because that sounds like a person’s private part). The right has insisted Bush 41 be placed next to Benedict Arnold in Texas textbooks ever since he broke his pledge and refused to send our government into debt.
After Republicans made the word “tax” unfit to mention in public, Democrats dutifully fell into line. “Dutiful Democrats” is not only alliterative, it is also descriptive. When Obama channeled Mitt Romney and came up with a mandate in his reform of health care, like Romney he insisted the mandate is a penalty and not a tax and that’s how the Massachusetts law reads. A funny thing happened on the way to the Supreme Court. The administration argued with forked tongue. Obama’s solicitor general argued that if the court found the mandate unconstitutional, they could consider the penalty a tax thereby making the law constitutional.
It appeared that during oral arguments before the court, Obamacare was going to be struck down simply because Justice Antonin Scalia does not like broccoli. Somewhere along the way, liberal aliens kidnapped Chief Justice John Roberts. Trapped inside a disgusting left-wing spaceship festooned with photos of FDR, LBJ and JFK, Roberts capitulated and came up with a plan to uphold Obamacare. He found the mandate was really a tax.
By a 5-4 vote, the world of the Fox News community was shattered. Coming on top of HBO’s decision to air a documentary on George H.W. Bush, it was too much to for the right to bear. What would be next, moving the nation’s capital to Berkeley? In some evangelical circles, Roberts is now viewed as the anti-Christ (although with Obama already considered the anti-Christ, right-wing biblical scholars are now scurrying to see if there can be co-anti-Christs).
You would have thought the Supreme Court decision upholding the health-care penalty and calling it a tax to make it constitutional would be popular with liberals. Instead liberals fretted (it is what liberals do best). Despite using the tax argument to get the law upheld, a short-sleeved president is, at this very moment, in the backyard of a wealthy contributor, arguing his mandate is a penalty not a tax. Meanwhile Romney is running TV ads that consist solely of the word “tax” both in English and Spanish (he badly needs more Latino votes).
The problem is Romney himself is a bit vulnerable on the issue. When he was Massachusetts governor, he publicly argued that the mandate is not a tax. The Obama campaign has already spent two gazillion dollars showing Romney uttering those fateful words. To compound the confusion, Romney’s first reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision was to agree the mandate is not a tax at the very same time the Republican leadership was arguing the mandate is a tax (somewhere Rick Santorum is smiling). Romney then reversed himself again quicker than you can say flip-flop and is now arguing the mandate is a tax after all.
My fellow Americans, I have a simple definition of a tax increase. If the government takes an action that causes me directly to put out more money, it is a tax. If that same government action forces you to put out more money and doesn’t affect me, then it is not a tax. Since the penalty or tax in the new health-care law only applies to those who freeload off our health-care system (I have coverage), then I really don’t care what you call it.
Pardon my French, but tax those SOBs.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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