Obamacare just committed suicide before the SCOTUS

The government should put a budget into place, listing all of its line-item expenditures, and allow every American who pays taxes to allocate where their dollars are to be assigned.

 

Quick question (but a sincere one): with all to the talk of this being a tax or not....why didn't Obama just call it a tax, collect it like a tax, and then have the Feds distribute it to the insurance companies for payment?

Not saying I would support such action, by any means, but I wonder why they didn't just take this most obvious route and prevent this challenge from even occurring?

 

Because many Americans hear the word "tax" and proceed to freak the [uck fay] out.

 

No. Wife's insurance.

 

Thanks, IP.

I wish someone would have just said that earlier (from the Administration). That seems like a helluva long way to go to get around the tax-and-spend monicker, but I expected it to be something along those lines, but wasn't sure.

Listening to the oral arguments yesterday, regarding if it is a tax, had the same flavor as Clinton's impeachment deposition, where he argued over what the definition of "is" is.

You know...if the law is upheld, they get what they want, and move forward. If its stricken, is it likely that they simply use the ruling as a roadmap insofar as how to tweak and resubmit it to Congress (within whatever parameters SCOTUS gives, if any), but this time as a straight tax. And they'll claim that they had "no choice" but do so as a result of the ruling.

 

The purpose of the Federal Government is to protect its citizens from threats both domestic and abroad. I realize I must pay for that. (Though I don't understand why only 53% of working Americans are expected to shoulder the burden)

Taking money from 1 citizen and handing it to another doesn't seem principled to me. I understand why it is done. Doing so buys the loyalty of the receiving citizen at the ballot box.

You know it would be wrong for you to walk up to someone and take their money for your personal gain. But for some reason it is OK if the Government acts as the middle man.

 

I understand your points, and agree with them on some level. I also think that there is a cost for living in a civilized society. Those costs should be shared by all though.

 

I don’t understand how taking money I have earned (and want to spend on my mortgage, my bills, my retirement, my Mom’s quality of life in her declining years, my nieces education, charity of choice, etc) and giving that money to a college coed (with an ipad, cell phone, active social life, ivy league education, etc.) so that she can buy birth control pills (because a condom doesn’t feel right) makes our society more civilized.

 

Not what I meant. The military isn't the only service that benefits everyone.

 

I know what you meant. I just went to the extreme. You seem reasonable. The problem is that the system has been corrupted by politicians to buy loyalty at the ballot box.

 

No doubt. Until those guys decide that getting re-elected isn't the most important thing for the country, we will continue down that road along with lobbyists' legalized bribery. The average man that works everyday is the least represented demographic in our nation. All in the name of maintaining a cushy job.....

 

But that's what good politicians do. They figure out ways to allocate finite resources to their constituents. Jimmy Quillen negotiating to get the VA hospital and Medical school in Johnson City, for example. Getting federal dollars to improve roads and build bridges, maintain the Blue Ridge Parkway or the Great Smokey Mountains.

At the local level property taxes and wheel taxes maintain local roads, keep lights on at the football field, and the local county library open. Politics at its core is about distributing other people's stuff. That's what it has always been and will always be. We can fight about what and how much to distribute, but allocation is at the heart of the political system. I don't find anything corrupt about that.

 

I may be wrong but I don’t thing allocating to social programs (taking from 1 citizen and giving to another) started until the middle of the last century.

 

Seems principled to me.

If you starting your own country from scratch and you're trying to brainstorm and figure out what kind of government your country will have, you might ask yourself: what does government do? why do we have government?

You will come up with things like:
-put rules in place that make for a society that lives and let lives (no stealing; no killing, etc.)
-put enforcement measures into place so that people are strongly discouraged from going against the above rules (cops, criminal proceedings, jails)
-give the people a place to settle disputes non-vioently and a set of rules to go by in resolvign those disputes (the civil side of the judicial branch)
-make sure people can run businesses smoothly (law of contracts and sales, uniform currency, commercial paper,
-come up with a way of collecting some dough to put these essential functions into palce (IRS)
-Oh yeah, most importantly, we need to make sure that those bastards to the East of us can't bomb our country and take over our government at will (military).

I would actually argue that the "common defense" is the *most* essential function that any government performs. We take for granted that nobody is going to bomb the shit out of us, but the reason that we can rest easy with that knowledge is because we do have a military.

You'll notice that I did not include "set up a system for taking the money away from the productive members of society and giving it to the deadbeats". That was intentional. I do not believe that to be an essential -- or even desirable -- role of a government.
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KB, I do favor a temporary system designed to help those that may find themselves out of a job. I do feel that it should be a bridge not a hammock. I also favor requiring community service in order to receive help. I have no problems with my tax money funding that type of program. What pisses me off is when you have generational welfare families full of folks so sorry that if breathing weren't an involuntary relfex, they'd be dead inside 5 minutes. I can't tell you how many times a student refuses to do anything except sleep in class has told me something to the effect of I don't need to do any schoolwork. I'm going to draw a check like my mom and dad and my grandparents. The first time I heard the response of 'I'm going to draw' to my questioning of what a kid that wouldn't lift their finger, I responded with you want to be an artist? The kid said no, I'm going to draw a crazy check from the govt likevmy dad. It's sad.

 

You are presuming all social programs include "taking from one to give to another" by means of an income tax. But the Federal Government has been involved in "social programs" --broadly defined -- for quite a while and before the income tax we know today. The Freedman's Bureau is one example and the Land Grant Act another. There was also a very generous pension program for disabled Civil War soldiers after the war as well as widows of the war. It was, in essence, a national welfare program for anyone affected by the war.

 

What I am getting at is that you are taking a "the end justifies the means" stance by saying you don't mind an income tax if the money goes to an enumerated power. Either you don't think money should be forcibly taken from you, or you think sometimes it should. See what I mean?

 

I would think in that case the money isn't really taken so much as it is used to support a service the government provides to VD.

 

It isn't "taken" only in the sense that it is being used for a purpose one agrees with. Kind of semantics, there. What I'm trying to get at is if an income tax is "taking person A's money forcibly," then it shouldn't matter whether the use is justified.

 

A defensive army protects all the civilians. Welfare helps only certain civilians. I think it matters quite a bit, as he specifically stated he didn't wan this money forcibly taken so it could be handed over to someone else.