That’s the kind of question that needs to be asked of Mary Jo Kilroy, Steve Driehaus, John Boccieri, and all Ohio Democrats in, or seeking, a seat in Congress.
I’ll leave it to the brilliant Charles Krauthammer to explain why…
We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.
[…]
That’s where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1trillion a decade.
It’s the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.
[…]
Obama’s strategy is […]: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.
Now that we’re a couple weeks removed from the Obamacare vote and the media has come to understand exactly what it means for spending, as outlined by Krauthammer above, it’s the responsibility of the fourth estate, and all Americans, to find out how our Representatives plan to pay for it.
With the President’s deficit reduction commission not providing any results of their work until after November, the time is now to begin asking those who gave us this law whether they will continue to follow the European model or not. And if not, what is their alternative?
Because claiming Obamacare pays for itself is laughable. And 61% of Americans agree that Obamacare will worsen the deficit .
That means they deserve an answer as to how it will be managed. And they deserve that answer before they pull the lever in November.
