Posted on 07/02/2012 9:37:44 AM PDT by donjuanluis07
If you read my recent post, "Supreme Court Upholds Poll Tax?" you might have a little trouble understanding why this is important to all Americans. The reason is simple, the decision made by the Supreme Court on the 28th of June, a day that will live in infamy, WAS ILLEGAL!!! Our constitution is clear about the power and type of authority the Federal Government has to levy taxes, and the Federal Government of the United States of America is barred by our Constitution from imposing a direct tax on individuals. In other words they may NOT impose a direct tax on an individual because he or she does not purchase a health care product.
http://www.rinolist.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/johnny-bobby.jpg
(Excerpt) Read more at rinolist.org ...
THIS!!!!
Okay. Now I know where you stand as well.
Thanks for sharing your opinion.
In my opinion, after reading the decision, the individual mandate is in fact an income tax and the "penalty" is a tax as well.
“Okay. Now I know where you stand.
Thanks for sharing your opinion.”
Now I know where you stand on me sharing my opinion. Thank you for thanking me for my opinion. (I can waste posts, too.)
It’s not based on income.
What is "it's"? The penalty or the individual mandate?
“under the Constitution that tax must be apportioned among the whole population”
Apportioned among the states, you mean.
Correct. Its by state.
“without regard to property, profession, or any other circumstance”
Oh, by the way, another point on how ridiculous and false is this statement. Were it true, there never would have been a 16th amendment, because the tax on having a certain amount of income would be perfectly legal. But it wasn’t, because income status did not prior to the 16th amendment reach taxable status because it was a head tax and would only be legal if apportioned among the states as stipulated in the Constitution.
It still is a head tax, by the way. Only it is specifically exempted from the ban on direct taxes by the aforementioned amendment. I’ve pretended myself in the past that the income tax is a tax on money coming into you. In other words, that it’s a tax on activity, as are duties, consumption taxes, etc. But it isn’t. The income tax is a tax on status. It is a tax on the condition of possessing a certain amount of money, for simplification’s sake, at the end of the year which you didn’t have the year before. It is, therefore, a direct tax. Which is why it had to be singled out for justification in the 16th amendment.
“’It’s not based on income.’
‘What is “it’s”? The penalty or the individual mandate”
“It” is what it was in your post: the penalty/tax. The mandate, by the way, is now a phantom. It doesn’t actually exist, or to say the same thing has no legal force. Only the tax exists; the mandate is an explicit implication that in the eyes of SCOTUS does not rise to coercion because the so-called tax backing it up is justified.
I was looking for your determination as to what type of tax it is, not Roberts'.
Do you contend that's it's not a tax at all.
In my view it is not a tax.
What kind of a tax is it? Roberts called it a “tax on not obtaining health insurance.”
What you said:
Pretty close. What the decision actually says...
Um, ROBERTS USED THE EXACT WORDS I SAID HE USED IN DESCRIBING WHAT CONGRESS DID:
From page 40 of the slip opinion, quoting Roberts:
Even if the taxing power enables Congress to impose a tax on not obtaining health insurance, any tax must still comply with other requirements in the Constitution....
I trade my labor/skills/knowledge evenly for a set amount.
I make no gain in doing so as my time and labor are the only thing I truly own.
If I make a financial gain from investing what I've made in that even trade (rent house, stocks, etc.) then that, to me, is the only thing that should be taxed.
If I'm never given the opportunity to make a gain, due to my labor being taxed beforehand in the form of an income tax, I'll never rise above a certain, limited level of wealth.
“How can a penalty exist if there is no mandate?”
Well, it’s not a “penalty,” is it? It’s now a tax. The “mandate” tells us who is to be taxed, but then it’s not a mandate. It’s an order without force of law clarifying the tax, which itself contains its own implied order.
What you have to understand, here, is that the law was rewritten by Roberts. The way it was passed there is a mandate and a penalty. The way it’s been interpreted is there’s a tax/penalty only. That’s because whereas the feds have no power to order you to own insurance they do have the power to tax.
Can you be unfamiliar with the tactic of social engineering via the tax code? Its simple. Whensoever governments don’t want to outright order behavior, because they lack the power or because they fear the people, they induce people by making things more or less expensive via taxes, subsidies, loopholes, etc. In this case since they cannot legally order people to buy insurance via the commerce clause or whatever, they are left with penalizing people through the tax code for not having insurance. Which SCOTUS says is okay, even though it would not be okay if all they had was the mandate with no tax behind it.
They’ll speak as if the madate still exists, but that’s just talk. It only exists in regards as it’s tied to the penalty as justified by the taxing power. It has no power on its own. They’ll use doublespeak like: “the Government asks the Court to view the mandate as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product.” That doesn’t means what it says. What the government asked and what Roberts gave them is for the penalty, not the mandate, to be a tax on those who don’t have insurance.
The mandate only tells us what are the conditions for being taxed, which does not constitute being a mandate.
You said...Roberts called it a “tax on not obtaining health insurance.”
So Roberts didn't call it a "tax on not obtaining health insurance" but Congress did.
Right?
“There’s nothing to penalize if the mandate doesn’t exist and it sure looks to me like the mandate exists as a tax.”
The mandate does not exist as a tax. The tax is the tax. The tax implies a mandate, to the extent that we don’t need explicit language to order us to buy insurance. That there is explicit language to that effect, which we call “the mandate” is a historical curiosity. It is a holdover from before Roberts turned the penalty into a tax.
You can persist in calling the tax a mandate, as most no doubt will. But that’s loose talk, and has nothing to do with actual law.
But everyone still has to either follow the mandate and buy insurance or pay the penalty tax, right?
It's "do one or the other", isn't it?
“To me the income tax is supposed to be a tax on gain”
It is, but they measure that by the amount of new wealth you possess, not on any activity. The reason prior to the 16th amendment they could tax imports, consumption, etc. is because those involved discreet activities. They didn’t tax the possession of whiskey with excise taxes, but the purchase thereof. To tax possession would be a direct tax.
Same with taxing income. If they taxed the exchange of money from the employer’s hand to yours like a sale, then it would be not be a head tax. But they don’t; they tax you according to how much you owen at the end of the year as compared to last year. And that is a direct tax.
“I trade my labor/skills/knowledge evenly for a set amount.
I make no gain in doing so as my time and labor are the only thing I truly own.
If I make a financial gain from investing what I’ve made in that even trade (rent house, stocks, etc.) then that, to me, is the only thing that should be taxed”
I don’t really understand the distinction. You do own your time and labor, but there’s nothing less “true” about how you own property. Your person and the activities in which you choose to participate are perhaps more fundamental and less abstract than how you own stock or land, for instance. But that shouldn’t make a difference, and actually doesn’t, as to whether they’re allowed to be taxed.
No.
Roberts is characterizing what HE believes Congress did when he says Congress enacted a “tax on not obtaining health insurance.”
I do not believe it is a tax in reality. Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy do not believe it is a tax in reality.
However I do not have a vote on the Supreme Court. Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy do not have ENOUGH votes on the Supreme Court in this case.
If the Supreme Court says 5-4 that the emperor is wearing a fine new suit of clothes, then the emperor is wearing a fine new suit of clothes as far as the Constitution is concerned, no matter what the little boy in the crowd says.
Roberts and four justices ruled that Congress enacted a tax on not obtaining health insurance.
That is the law of the land.
I don’t believe they were right, the four dissenters do not believe they were right, but what ROBERTS said the Congress did IS NOW WHAT THE CONGRESS DID as far as the Constitution is concerned.
Capiche?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.