“Credibility Crisis”: Another Major ObamaCare Claim Exposed As False By Obama Admin.
Washington — Yet another core claim President Obama made to sell his government takeover of health care is being contradicted by his own administration, this time right as he gets ready to promote his financial regulation plan to a skeptical public. In April, the chief Medicare actuary confirmed that ObamaCare actually raises health care costs instead of lowering them as the president promised. Now it’s the Justice Department arguing in court that the individual mandate at the heart of ObamaCare is in fact a tax, a notion the president “absolutely” rejected last fall. This run-in with the truth has led one Yale Law professor and ObamaCare supporter to say that the president simply “has not been honest with the American people.” Under the headline “President Obama faces growing credibility crisis,” the Financial Times quotes a former Clinton Administration official and Obama supporter as saying that “Americans don’t believe in President Obama’s leadership.” It’s going to be hard for Americans to “believe in” the president’s leadership when he “has not been honest” about how his job-killing agenda will hurt middle-class families and small businesses.
The New York Times highlights how the president’s own Justice Department is arguing that ObamaCare breaks his “firm pledge” not to raise taxes on middle-class families:
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“When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s ‘power to lay and collect taxes.’ … “While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax. … When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, ‘I absolutely reject that notion.’ “Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the new law, said … ‘Mr. Obama has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill,’ Mr. Balkin said last month at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization. ‘This bill is a tax.’” |
As this chart by Ways and Means Republicans demonstrates, ObamaCare includes at least a dozen violations of the President’s “firm pledge” not to raise taxes on the middle class:
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In fact, ObamaCare is chock-full of so many tax hikes and burdensome mandates that the Internal Revenue Service’s ombudsman has already determined that the agency is “neither structured nor funded to effectively oversee social programs” and will “face challenges making productive use” of all the information small businesses will be required to file under the law’s job-killing mandates.
Last month, House Republicans forced a vote on a measure offered by Ways and Means Ranking Member Dave Camp (R-MI) that would repeal the job-killing, unconstitutional ‘individual mandate’ tax at the heart of ObamaCare. Rep. Camp’s idea has been posted here on the America Speaking Out website, and Americans are urged to visit, read about the proposal, and share their ideas.
(Source: Boeing)
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