The ObamaCare fiscal cliff

While we're busy listening to President Obama demand a $1.6 trillion tax increase on some people as the price for disarming part of a $1.2 trillion tax bomb aimed at other people, let's not forget that he's already detonated a $1.058 trillion tax warhead on all of us: ObamaCare.

As the House Ways and Means Committee noted last summer, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision upholding ObamaCare, it contains 21 distinct tax increases, "a dozen of which target Americans earning less than $200,000 per year for singles or $250,000 per year for married couples."  In other words, the Sainted Middle Class.

And we're not talking about the shape-shifting extra-Constitutional tax/penalty "individual mandate,' either.  That's a mere $55 billion of the total.  These are good old-fashioned cash grabs, no different than the $2,000 bite from Taxmageddon that "working Americans" are supposed to be upset about.  Among the larger items is a surtax on capital gains that we delicate middle-class flowers will be encountering if we try to sell our houses.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) mentioned another ominous tax increase from ObamaCare on Friday: "ObamaCare raises taxes on middle-income families, employers and investors.  It hikes taxes on people with no health insurance, people with too little insurance and people with too much.  Taxes are even going up on pacemakers, prosthetics, and other vital medical equipment.  The ObamaCare tax hikes are a big part of the fiscal cliff.  Stopping them should be part of the solution."

Pacemakers, prosthetics, and other vital medical equipment?  That doesn't sound like the fashionable trinkets rich people buy and stuff into vaults, along with the dusty piles of gold coins and rubies that Obama wants to take from them. Those are items vital to the quality of life for a great many poor and middle-income people.  $20 billion worth of new taxes are heading for the industry that produces them, on top of the same increased labor costs that ObamaCare is dropping on every employer.  Those costs will be passed along to the customer, as all business taxes are.

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