PrintJuly 1, 2012
The Constitutionality of the ObamaCare Tax
It comes as a surprise that one of the Supreme Court's liberty-leaning justices sided with the authoritarians to find that ObamaCare is constitutional. He made the expected finding that the mandate to purchase insurance was unconstitutional, but he found that the penalty for failing to meet that mandate was actually a tax, and therefore constitutional. Considering that a tax is a levy on doing something, it seems strange to find that government can levy a tax on doing nothing, but by using the legal principle of equivalence, it becomes clear that President Obama's attempt to bring affordable health insurance to all was actually a massive, regressive income tax.
The principle of equivalence is simple; if Congress might accomplish the same thing through different wordings of the law, then the laws are the same. Instead of charging a direct "penalty" (tax) for the failure to purchase health insurance, the ObamaCare "penalty" could have been enacted as a significant...(Read Full Article)
