Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Who's Lying Now?

The July 23, 2010 Las Vegas Review-Journal has a nice summary of President Obama's flip-flopping on whether the individual mandate is a tax or not.

Here's an excerpt from "Health Care Lies":
...[W]hile 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. "I absolutely reject that notion," he said emphatically.

Why? Because Mr. Obama was loathe to admit he'd massively violated his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on anyone but the rich, presumably...

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is "a valid exercise" of Congress's power "to impose taxes."

...One of two things is true, here.

Either the mandate is a tax, as the Obama Justice Department now asserts in court, and President Barack Obama lied to the American people -- loudly, firmly, repeatedly, as he worked to get this massive federal power grab enacted -- or else Barack Obama was telling the truth last year, the penalty is not a tax, and the Justice Department (directly answerable to the president) is lying in court today when it asserts no one can challenge the mandate because it falls under the wide-ranging "taxing authority" ... that it's a tax.

Someone's lying: either Barack Obama or Barack Obama.
(Via @TOSjournal.)