What Kind of Tax

Today Judge Roberts declared seemingly by fiat that the penalty in the Obama bill was really to be considered a tax. Aside from the issue of whether Supreme Court Justices can just rewrite laws as they please the question I have goes to “WHAT KIND OF TAX IS IT?”

According to the constitution congress has the right to levy several kinds of taxes of which this one doesn’t seem to fit under any of those categories. Now if the constitution doesn’t give them the right to just call any penalty a tax then it is still unconstitutional.

You cannot say simply by virtue of the fact that you’ve charge the IRS with collecting some penalty that it therefore must be tax. The IRS is not charged with collecting sales tax but that is a valid tax, but they are charge with the responsibility for the income tax, possibly excise taxes. I don’t see how simply saying that they have been charged with collecting this penalty that it is therefore a tax. Again congress has the right to enact only certain taxes constitutionally and what I want to know is which one this tax falls under?

It seems through most of this situation the concept of the constitution has been mostly lost. Some of the justices were concerned that it might be giving the federal government too much power to put extend the commerce clause any more so instead they vastly increased the power of the government forever through just calling things taxes and thus compelling the American people to buy things by simply putting a universal tax on something you want them to buy and thus they must by it or pay the tax but not get the thing which of course doesn’t make any sense.

Part of the problem as I see it is that there are states saying that they are going to opt out of Obamacare, but this doesn’t work because you still have to pay the tax or the Penalty/tax for it whether you take advantage of the service provided or not. In this Obama and the Democrats were very clever. And though the Justices didn’t really address this issue though I’m sure they think they did, they have thus left open the door for the government to demand that we buy things whether we want them or not and don’t even need the commerce clause to do it. It is not like having your state opt out of Obamacare in any way relieves you of the responsibility of paying your taxes. It seems to me that this would be like some state saying they were going to opt out of social security. They might not take the tax for the social security out of your check each month but come tax time you would still be responsible to pay that tax or pay the penalty. It is because of this that I say this will be implemented no matter what everywhere and on every state regardless if it is not repealed.

My real concern though is the new door the Supreme Court has now opened up through taxing to require all kind of things from the people. As I mentioned above the constitution is quite clear about the taxes that can be enacted against us and at least in this case this penalty/tax fits under none of those things.

It seems far more likely to me that Judge Roberts just didn’t want to spear being partisan in his vote and as a result sold us down the river yet eroding the constitution more. A big part of my concern in all this as has been stated on other occasions is that more and more “constitutional” is now based more on precedent than on the constitution itself. We have gotten very far away from the constitution trusting more to the wisdom of judges that interpret it to mean something than to our own common sense to understand what it means by a plain reading of it.

The constitution was not written for lawyers and judges it was written for the common man and was meant for the common man. Our founding fathers trusted to the common sense and virtue of the people to understand best what the constitution meant and now we are asked to believe that whatever these 9 men say must be write. I heard that almost all day today on the news and I must admit after a while it gets frustrating.

I keep hoping that maybe we’ll get judges in there that are more concerned with the construction of the constitution and what was intended instead of just what it might mean. Based on the latter I can make almost anything a person says mean something other than what they wanted it to mean. I would go so far as to say that I would defy even the best linguist or lawyer to say or write anything that could not be taken at least 2 ways and more likely even more than that. But if you were to look at what they said honestly in the light of the subject matter being discussed at the time it was said it would certainly be easy to determine what they meant. It then simply becomes a matter of where you want to abide with what they meant or make something up so you can do what you want.