{"id":1434,"date":"2009-06-14T09:18:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-14T17:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=1434"},"modified":"2009-06-14T09:24:26","modified_gmt":"2009-06-14T17:24:26","slug":"we-dont-want-to-discourage-it-we-just-want-to-tax-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/we-dont-want-to-discourage-it-we-just-want-to-tax-it\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;We don&#8217;t want to discourage it.  We just want to tax it.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Compare <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/newsOne\/idUSTRE55D1AK20090614\">this item of health care reform<\/a> being proposed by the Administration:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The president does not want to dismantle privately owned plans. He doesn&#8217;t want the 180 million people who have employer coverage to lose that coverage. He wants to strengthen the marketplace,&#8221; Sebelius added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>with <a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/44\/2009\/06\/02\/obama_health_overhaul_necessar.html\">this<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>President Obama, in a pivot from some of his harshest campaign rhetoric, told Democratic senators yesterday that he is willing to consider taxing employer-sponsored health benefits to help pay for a broad expansion of coverage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Versus this more recent pronouncement of Obama&#8217;s second:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Vice President Joe Biden opposed proposals being discussed by some lawmakers to tax health insurance benefits provided to people by employers as a way to pay for an overhaul of the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Which indicates that Obama is waffling either on his committment to not tax these benefits, or to consider taxing them, or that Biden hasn&#8217;t gotten the most recent memo.\u00a0 History shows that all three are possible, even at once, in terms of political positions.\u00a0 As economic propositions, though, the government will have to make a trade-off:\u00a0 reduce private health care by taxing it, or paying for public health care by raising the money elsewhere.\u00a0 Reality, unlike politics, won&#8217;t allow you to have it both ways, let alone all three.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Compare this item of health care reform being proposed by the Administration: &#8220;The president does not want to dismantle privately owned plans. He doesn&#8217;t want the 180 million people who have employer coverage to lose that coverage. He wants to strengthen the marketplace,&#8221; Sebelius added. with this: President Obama, in a pivot from some of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}