Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Wants To Tax Fat People
By V. Saxena, February 3, 2015.
Remember Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber? If you recall, he got busted for making some startling revelations about how Obama basically lied to the American people to get them to support his royally screwed-up law.
Well, according to new info from the Daily Caller, the beloved Obamacare architect once wrote an essay for the National Institute for Health Care Management in which he argued that we ought to tax fat people:
Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight.
While it is hard to conceive of this approach being a common public policy tool in the near term, such taxation may be happening indirectly through health insurance surcharges. Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI.
The new health reform legislation increases this differential to 30 percent, with the possibility of rising to 50 percent. Results of programs that use differential premiums to impose direct financial penalties for obesity will bear watching in the future.
Gruber’s goal is not necessarily to raise money, but rather to impose nanny-state governance via taxes. He wants to effectively punish fat people for practicing their guaranteed right to eat like a bunch of hungry-ass pigs.
These sorts of taxes are what Gruber calls “sin taxes”:
U.S. policymakers have long used taxes on tobacco products and alcoholic beverages – so called “sin taxes” – both to moderate consumption of these products and to generate revenue. There is a pronounced inverse correlation between cigarette tax rates and cigarette consumption, and numerous studies have credited tobacco taxes as being the single most effective strategy in achieving our country’s dramatic reductions in smoking.
So again, Gruber’s goal is to use taxes to moderate the behavior of Americans.
You can read the piece in full here.
Question: Does moderating negative behavior via taxes make sense, or does it constitute a slick violation of our liberties?
http://downtrend.com/vsaxena/jonathan-gruber-tax-fat-people
