Tax Lawyer's Blog

“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”¹

 - Barack Obama -

If you had any doubts about the collectivist designs of this administration, reading the fine print of Obamacare will assuage them.

The New York Times reports that the newly enacted healthcare reform law is, in fact, a wealth redistribution bill:

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.

Fellow tax blogger Linda Beale seems to like the idea of government forced economic equality:

The health care reform will ask the rich to pick up some of the burden that they have set aside since Reagan by increasing payroll taxes and cutting Medicare subsidies. That’s a reasonable move in the right direction.

I think President Obama, Democrats who voted for the bill, and Professor Beale would do well to remember these wise words of Thomas Jefferson:

There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.²

Footnotes:

¹  The liberal approach to social justice is based on the following a priori assumptions:

• That we all have precisely the same intelligence, the same drive and the same moral compass; and
• That the only reason some of us are more successful than others is because the system is stacked in our favor. 

Of course, if you begin with these premises, your conclusion must be that wherever there is inequality, there is unfairness. Consequently, if some people are wealthy and other people are poor, social justice demands that the wealthy be relieved of some of their wealth for the purposes of redistribution to the non-wealthy, who, after all, are only getting what they were cheated out of in the first place.

²  The mere notion that some people are more worthy than others is, of course, anathema to liberals. See footnote 1, above.

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