Saul Bellow used to joke that while the unexamined life is not worth living, the examined life will make you wish you were dead. The political equivalent might be that we can’t live with taxation without representation, but taxation with representation is going to kill us.
By “us,” I mean those of us who like to find out what’s in a bill before Congress passes it; who would like our representatives to read bills before they vote on them; who want to see hearings on legislation before it is brought to a vote; and who would like to have it posted on a website for a few days before it is signed into law–just in case we have some questions after we find out what’s in it. For such people, Senator Rand Paul’s description of the Senate’s action in passing a $600 billion tax increase this week will be discouraging:
I think it was 2:00 in the morning, and everybody kind of wanted to go home. And so I think nobody had a chance really to read the bill. I’m not sure the bill really was even around for anybody to read at 2:00 in the morning. It certainly defied all of the rules that we have in the Senate. We have one specific rule that says bills have to be online for 48 hours. So when things get thrown together hurriedly in the night, people have no idea what’s in these bills.
At least the tax increase was called a tax increase. In 2010, President Obama pushed through Congress (at the last moment, with no hearings) a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income, calling it a “Medicare contribution.” But it was not a “contribution” and it had nothing to do with Medicare: it had no effect on the Medicare benefits of the person making the “contribution;” it had no effect on the Medicare benefits of anyone else; the revenue from the “contribution” did not go to the Medicare Trust Fund, but rather straight to the Treasury’s general fund, to be spent on things other than Medicare.
The individual mandate under Obamacare will be enforced by what the legislation called a “shared responsibility payment.” None dared call it a “tax” while it was being considered, but when it got to the Supreme Court, the Obama administration argued a tax is what it was. Chief Justice John Roberts upheld it as a new kind of tax–a tax for not doing something. It used to be that taxes were levied on income earned or things done. Now we have “shared responsibility payments” for not doing what Congress wants us to do (although the chief justice agreed Congress had no power to require us to do it). Undoubtedly there will be more “failure-to-do-it” taxes in the future, now that they have been constitutionally blessed.
It would take an extraordinary novelist to come up with concepts like these–“shared responsibility payments” that are not “taxes” when they are considered but become new kinds of “taxes” after they’re passed; new “Medicare contributions” that don’t go to Medicare or its “trust fund;” $600 billion tax increases considered by the world’s greatest deliberative body at two in the morning, without the benefit of hearings or public comment or even a text. The resulting novel wouldn’t sell as fiction–no one would willingly suspend disbelief. But as non-fiction it might do quite well.
Is there ever going to be a time when any of these "gov't expansion at any cost" politicians are held accountable for anything? If the unbelievable scandals (Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and all the green energy scams) haven't raised the general ire of the public, then I'm not sure anything Congress is or is not doing re: passing unread bill after unread bill is that big of a deal…
Probably not. Because as ignorant as the politicians are, the voters, most of them, are just as ignorant. And damned determinied to stay that way.
yeah because their getting free stuff. Mitt was right there is a 47% out there that's sucking the life out of this country. Better pay your taxes so the sick lame and the lazy can free load off of the government.
Are there any responsible adults out ther??! I know when I got a mortgage for my house I read the fine print. There are home buyers who didn't read the fine print but want to be bailed out because now they can't afford it, and now we have Congress passing bills such as Obamacare and now the Fiscal Cliff bill without taking the time or having enough time to read them! Where are the adults in this country??! This is total lack of respect for the taxpayer.
…which is why we probably need to achieve a tipping point from our national insolvency and the resulting and inevitable economic collapse in order to shock Americans into once again becoming adults. As horrible and painful as it will be, I don't see any other way. I think Republicans should create a shadow govt and show the public what they *would* do if they held the levers of power (hopefully the more conservative Republicans would have the most influence) and never tire of reminding the public that a reckoning is coming thanks to big govt liberalism. Maybe, just maybe, in the aftermath of the economic apocalypse, people will finally wake up to how insidious big govt liberalism is and once again become adults rather than blithely accepting what has now enveloped us.
The voters are ignorant for one reason – the MSM keeps them so. If Bush were in the WH, hell, if Hillary were in the WH, the MSM would have focused on these stories non stop. Over time, voters would become aware and outraged. Not with Obama. n nPersonally, I don't think the Republicans will ever get past this problem unless they go after the MSM hard. They need to make the MSM fear them somehow – target their sources of funding and decision makers pocketbooks in every way possible. n
I am so sick and tired of this administration already and we're stuck with him for another four years unless we can get a GOP majority in both houses and impeach him for his transgressions that are starting to stack up. Wait till the tax increases. ____ We have a top heavy authoritarian, tyrannical out of control leviathan that needs to be stopped, or at least slowed down. But don't worry he's historical and if you disagree with him you're a racist.
Mitt Romney sold Romneycare (aka Obamacare) in Massachusetts as a matter of personal responsibility. He referred to those without insurance, who depended on tax-payer supported "free" medical care as "free riders."