From Bloomberg News
87 percent of the revenue in the original Baucus proposal to finance Obamacare would come from individuals with incomes of less than $200,000.
The U.S. Senate’s version of Obamacare finally is emerging into broad daylight, and the more people see of it, the less popular it should be.
For all the rhetoric, the plan is quite easy to sketch, thanks in part to an analysis by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
So here goes: Under the health-care plan advanced by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, lower- and middle-class people who have insurance today are going to be taxed and squeezed in order to cover people who don’t.
The money to finance the new entitlement comes from two main sources, tax increases and Medicare cuts. Medicare cuts are mostly borne by elderly folks with modest means. That undoubtedly explains why seniors are so concerned.
The tax increases, by contrast, have received little attention. There has been almost no discussion of the simple question: who would pay the tab?
Think about how unusual that is. It is a radical departure from past tax debates. When President George W. Bush was in office, every tax proposal, no matter how minor, seemed to be buried by a blizzard of detailed distributional analyses that went from think-tank Web sites to the front pages of your favorite newspaper instantaneously.
In this debate, the distributional-industrial complex has remained silent.
Such remarkable silence in the noisiest town on earth can only be caused by an uncomfortable truth. And the mother of all uncomfortable truths is lurking below the surface in the health debate. If you are a card-carrying member of the left-wing establishment, you can’t analyze the distributional consequences of the health bill, because if you do, you will catch President Barack Obama in a lie.
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