Posted on 07/11/2010 12:11:26 PM PDT by Kaslin
In the waning days of the ObamaCare debate, Republicans warned repeatedly that the IRS would need thousands of new agents to enforce the new health-insurance mandate, and that the bill didn’t provide enough resources to fund them. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) estimated that it would take 15,000 new agents, while Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) said that the IRS would need at least $5 billion more than what Democrats allocated for the first ten years of the program. Now the IRS’ independent watchdog says Republicans were right, and that Congressional Democrats and the White House seriously underestimated enforcement costs:
A warning that federal tax officials will need more congressional funding to administer the Democrats’ health reform law has rekindled the partisan debate over its cost effectiveness.
Senior Republicans have said for months that the new responsibilities required of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) under the legislation would saddle the agency with billions of dollars in additional costs — expenses not accounted for in the bill.
A Wednesday report from the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA), an independent watchdog within the IRS, backed those claims, finding that the agency currently lacks the resources to take on the new duties. …
“Before ObamaCare passed, [Minority Leader John Boehner] and others warned that it would require an army of new IRS agents,” Boehner (R-Ohio) spokesman Michael Steel said in an email. “Democrats denied it. Now we know the truth.”
So how much will the IRS need? No one knows — and that’s the point that Republicans have been making all along. The NTA can’t figure it out, the IRS can’t estimate it, and the Democrats never seriously attempted to determine it at all. Like many other provisions of ObamaCare, they simply made up cost numbers in order to argue that the bill would be deficit neutral.
Even Democratic Senator Max Baucus, one of the original authors of ObamaCare, admitted as much in response to the NTA assessment:
The office of Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Finance Committee, echoed that, saying Friday that funding and staffing levels won’t be decided until the IRS comes up with an implementation strategy.
“Until those factors are determined,” a Finance aide said in an email, “it’s premature to specify what the IRS will need, and certainly premature to infer the IRS won’t be able to handle it.”
That certainly is true — and again, exactly what Republicans pointed out in the debate. No one knows what the costs will really be for enforcement of the mandate, which means no one knows whether this is a deficit-neutral system at all. These costs and enforcement strategies should have been determined before passage of the bill, not left as an ambiguous fog in the very middle of how Americans will have to interact with government once ObamaCare gets fully implemented.
In fact, Congress should never have passed ObamaCare at all, since these issues clearly go beyond its competence, and this is yet another piece of evidence of just how far over their heads this got.
The IRS can never be large enough nor powerful enough to enforce the liberal agenda.
BUMP
Democrats and hussein lie and people die.
That might explain why a few agents I’ve been dealing with have been suddenly “re-assigned” and dumped the cases they were working on (not that I’m complaining, mind you).
That is good news.
Obamacare will never see the light of day. WHEN IS THIS DAMN THING GOING TO THE SCOTUS???? Can anyone here give a timeline of the path to SCOTUS?
Good. Now repeal the monster.
... and IMPEACH the mobster!
Setting up an excuse for the “Obama Gestapo” civilian service to step in?
So consistent with the democrat/liberal world view. More federal workers, more punishment of the successful, more giveaways to the least motivated in society.
In order to enforce this, they will need to keep their boot at the throat of the American taxpayer. Things are bad enough as it is. This would lead to revolution.
Yes. We need to to keep this thing front and center
The list, ping
Indeed. Remember how much the court has turned to citing "good ideas from outside the country" to inform their decisions.
Well, most of the rest of the world has socialized medicine.
Meanwhile, do you think the SCOTUS will rule based on the 'outdated' Constitution when the DOJ is getting traction in lower courts saying that Arizona can't impede the flow of illegal aliens because that is a form of Interstate Commerce!?
Or the Dept of the Interior says they will go along with the courts if the courts rule in their favor on the drilling ban, but if the courts rule against them, then they will do it again anyway.
You say tomato, I say banana republic.
Is this bad?
Great...here goes the next excuse to grow yet another government bureaucracy. (eye roll)
REPEAL OR DIE!!
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