Does anyone understand Palin’s word salad tweet?
He said what wasn’t a tax? Healthcare itself? Maybe I’m missing the nuance here, but Obama obviously agrees with the Court that his own legislation is Constitutional, right? And the Court just decided that striking down the mandate would be an implicit tax on the insured, right? So we all agree we shouldn’t tax the insured, right? So how does this make Obama a liar?
Seriously, what is that woman huffing out there?
I generally wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for sussing out the logic in the subtext (one assumes it has to be somewhere, right?)…but you’re reading it the way I did. Oh I weep for the loss of freedom that comes with…letting people die prematurely.
Heaven help me but I do understand what she means. President Obama pledged that the Affordable Care Act would be paid for without raising taxes. Purely as aq riposte to that, Republicans characterized the fine that the uninsured would pay as a tax, President Obama disagreed with that characterization. Now the Supreme Court has upheld the mandate (the “carry insurance or pay this fine” clause) on the basis that the fine falls under Congress’s power to tax.
Ergo, the fine is a tax.
Ergo, Obama was wrong in saying it wasn’t.
This doesn’t make it a lie. It means that the Supreme Court (who has final say) subscribes to a different theory of the law than the one that the president proposed. So what Palin is doing is the equivalent of a kindergartener who, when informed of a change of plans brought about by unforeseeable outside forces like the weather, starts screaming about how she was promised they could go to the park and everyone lies and it’s awful.
