"It's a penalty because you have a choice," Carney said. "You don't have a choice to pay your taxes, right? You have a choice to buy -- if you can afford health insurance. … So if you don't buy it, and you can afford it, it is an irresponsible thing to do to ask the rest of America's taxpayers to pay for your care when you go to the emergency room. So your choice is to purchase healthcare reform or a penalty will be administered."
HotAir: Democrats had a little trouble with their messaging yesterday in the wake of what should have been a big victory for them last week at the Supreme Court. Instead, the legal victory has given way to a huge political headache, and perhaps even a linguistic headache as well. How can Democrats argue that ObamaCare isn’t a huge tax when the Supreme Court decision that upheld it clearly states that it’s only constitutional as a huge tax? Nancy Pelosi tried arguing that it’s not a tax but a penalty when challenged by David Gregory on Meet the Press, but even she couldn’t spit that one out cleanly.
You're a free rider, Nance! Seriously, is anybody actually buying Nancy's BS?
Ed Morrissey concludes quite correctly:
"Of course the mandate is a tax, and neither Gregory nor Chris Wallace with Jack Lew actually get to the heart of the problem. Both of them limit the tax question to just the penalty, but the mandate requires taxpayers to spend a significant amount of money in a very narrow way. They must buy health insurance from private providers — and not just any insurance or a plan that best meets their own specific needs, but a one-size-fits-all plan — or pay a penalty to the IRS. That’s a tax either way; the only difference is who collects it. It’s the first federal tax applied in general to the public (as opposed to an excise tax on certain sales transactions that could be avoided by not participating in that kind of trade, for instance) that has to be paid to a private entity rather than government. Either way, though, the government forces taxpayers to spend that money just on the basis of their existence, and that’s clearly a tax even if you never have to pay the penalty to the IRS."
And with this new tax comes "nearly 4000" new IRS agents who are "slated for enforcement." Yeah, Nancy, there's no way this isn't a tax!
And remember, this is the lady who thinks jail time is "very fair" for failure to purchase Obamacare coverage...
ADDENDUM: Good point from Rush today about Nancy's mocking of free riders...
"This is the party that celebrates free riders. This is the party that devotes itself to creating even more free riders. This is a party that could not survive without free riders and freeloaders. This is a party that does everything it can to make people as dependent as possible on the government. Free riders, freeloaders. And now this ruling is apparently so distasteful that the Democrat Party has to do a 180 and start attacking their own voters. Well, what happened to the precious 30 to 50 million uninsured? This is the piece de resistance, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi mocking free riders. The entire mission of the Democrat Party is to create more and more free riders. Haven’t they seen to it that almost half the country doesn’t pay income tax, a bunch of free riders?"
