The butt-hurt is still palpable these many years later? How utterly pathetic. So, according to the Solomons here, it’s not a tax if Congress gives it some other label.
Gee, I wonder why Congress didn’t think of that in 1895. Just think, instead of having to amend the Constitution to add the 16th Amendment, Congress could have just enacted an “income mandate†instead of an “income tax†and - if the Solomons here are correct - it would have passed muster in 1895 because it wasn’t a tax, simply because Congress used a different label.
Wow. Genius. Not.
The mandate was written in with a penalty. You can't penalize people for breathing, for simply being alive, that's a fundamental Right. But they can pass a law requiring whatever, and penalize people who don't comply with the law. Hence, a penalty.
The pushers of Obamacare repeatedly said it wasn't a "tax" on breathing, but a penalty for not complying with an insurance requirement mandated by Congress. A go-zillion times we heard it wasn't a "tax".
Along comes Roberts and decides it
is a tax, even though it did not originate as revenue measures are Constitutionally required to, in the House of Representatives, and rewrote the law to make the penalty a tax.
It is an incorrect ruling on so many levels it's gobsmacking.
I, for one, lost my health insurance coverage as a result of Obamacare's passage and being upheld by the ruling at SCOTUS. My insurer simply stopped writing and renewing policies. The exchanges would have cost a minimum of 28,000 for a family of 4 in this state, with a 14K deductible. That was cost prohibitive. (Previous costs for high deductible insurance were about 6K a year, plus the deductibles and co pays if we needed it.) The penalty/tax was cheaper than the 'cure'.
Thank God we're healthy.