Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Lower Taxes on Lower Incomes

It seems the Senate has passed a healthcare bill that takes back one of the president's promises. Back in February, Obama promised that families earning under $250,000 a year would not have their taxes increased. Unfortunately, the Senate healthcare bill just passed under the oversight of Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to involve certain loopholes that could lead to some taxpayers in this bracket paying higher taxes.

According to an editorial by Deroy Murdock published in today's Wooster Daily Record (from a Scripps Howard News Service distribution), this loopholes seems to apply to small-business owners who may file personal returns with earnings under $250,000, who could be paying higher taxes if they don't give health insurance coverage to every one of their employees. This may be unfair, although it is arguably not connected to the spirit of Obama's promise or pertinent to the majority of working Americans who earn less than $250K.

However, this is still a violation of Obama's promise, and it does not bode well. Apparently, this is what happened, according to Murdock's editorial:

Sen. Mike Crapo (R, Idaho) tried to enforce Obama's pledge by deleting from ObamaCare all taxes on families earning less than $250,000 and individuals making under $200,000. Every Republican supported Crapo's amendment. All but five Democrats ganged up and killed it.


There are other tax increases in the Senate bill that may cause trouble for ordinary Americans--at least according to Murdock--like taxes on medical devices or on health insurance companies themselves, which however well intentioned, probably will mean higher costs passed on to consumers as the companies being taxed jack up their prices to make up the difference. This is shitty, but it's how things work in our shitty economy. This is not my primary focus, though, since I don't actually know enough about economics to go through the arguments for and against such things in detail. I'm primarily worried about higher taxes on lower-income people directly, since this is what Obama promised would not happen.

I could go into detail about how Senate Democrats' actions apparently lend evidence to the assertion in my last post, that there is a danger that contemporary left-"liberalism" may put the government before the people in the name of using the government as a stand-in for the people. However, I don't feel like being that smug, though it is oddly interesting in a coldly detatched way. However--in part because I myself as well as most of my friends are currently in this tax bracket--I have a slightly harder time than normal looking at this issue through a detatched lens.

Murdock makes no secret of being extremely biased--justifiably or not--toward the Republicans and against the Democrats. Nationally distributed ditorials selected for my small-town paper tend to be conservatively biased. I don't know how many small-business owners file personal returns with under $250K in earnings, and I don't know how many working people will be affected by a loophole that appears to affect small-business owners.

All I know is that here is one liberal hippie-dippy Obama voter who's pissed off that Democrats can turn their back on their most...democratic values, and work to undermine a promise by a president of their party who many of them, if not most of them, claim to support.

Obama must do everything he can to make sure his promise is fulfilled, and work to quash any language in a finalized healthcare bill that would go against his promise to the taxpayers least able to pay extra (like me, for example).

Citation:

Murdock, Deroy. 30 Dec. 2009. "Santa Harry's gift of new health taxes." Wooster Daily Record, A4.