Tax Cheat Proposes Tax Hike To Partially Fund Health Care Overhaul

It's particularly rich that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY, Tax Cheat) and his fellow Democrats are proposing tax surcharges against the rich to fund health care reform. He couldn't be bothered to pay his actual tax obligations, and here he is busy proposing tax rate hikes on the wealthy to fund health care reform.

Let's examine their proposals.

House Ways and Means Committee members are likely to propose a surtax on high-income Americans to help pay for an overhaul of the health-care system, according to people familiar with the plan.

The tax would be similar to, yet much smaller than, a surtax proposed in 2007 by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a person familiar with the committee’s talks said. That plan would have added at least a 4 percent levy on incomes exceeding $200,000, and was projected to reap as much as $832 billion over 10 years.

Two people familiar with closed-door talks by committee Democrats said a House bill probably will include a surtax on incomes exceeding $250,000, as Congress seeks ways to pay for changes to a health-care system that accounts for almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy. By targeting wealthier Americans, a surtax may hold more appeal for House Democrats than a Senate proposal to tax some employer-provided health benefits.

“The surtax is obviously more attractive to Democrats in the House because it’s more progressive, which they find attractive in and of itself,” said Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research group focused on policies affecting low- and moderate-income families.

Rep. Rangel makes $174,900 this year. Isn't it amazing that he and his fellow members of Congress have written the proposed tax hikes so that they aren't affected by the hikes and yet they claim that they're being progressive.

On substantive grounds, these taxes will never cover the costs of the health care proposals, and will create structural deficits that will need to be covered at some point. The nation can hardly afford to take on the debt incurred by the stimulus spending package that hasn't stimulated the economy and here Congress is going on about creating another tax and spend package that will spend more than it should be expected to bring in.

We've repeatedly seen that tax rate hikes bring in revenues well below expectations, particularly in a recessionary environment, and here the Democrats are looking to tax the wealthy so as to create a health care overhaul that is unwarranted despite the doom and gloom that the Democrats claim exists regarding health care delivery in the nation. For all their talk about health care access, anyone in the nation can get health care. People grumble about the costs of health care, and this plan does nothing to address the costs. It shifts costs around, and the government isn't going to reduce those costs without imposing unintended consequences such as rationing of care, businesses eliminating their own benefits packages and shifting employee health care plans onto the government, reducing health care choices.