KNIGHT: Court's awful ruling taxes our patients - Washington Times

KNIGHT: Court's awful ruling taxes our patients - Washington Times

When is a tax not a tax? Answer: When you’re busy pushing a major expansion of government like Obamacare. The tax that is not a tax becomes a “penalty” or a “shared responsibility payment” in the text of the bill. In campaign lingo, it becomes an “investment.”

That’s what the Democrats told us when they rammed Obamacare down America’s throat. In a famous clip you can find on YouTube, President Obama adamantly denies to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the individual mandate is, in fact, a “tax.”

As soon as it hit the courts, however, the tax that is not a tax morphed back into a tax as Mr. Obama’s attorneys justified it through Congress‘ Article I power to tax and spend. The White House, which lambasted opponents for calling the mandate a tax, argued in court that the mandate’s enforcement under “Assessment” and “Collection” are right out of the code for the Internal Revenue Service, which will collect the tax, er, penalty, er, uh, tax. Yeah, that’s it.