Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay.

— Milton Friedman

How dare you save and invest your hard earned money while other people waste it can’t afford to. It’s just not fair that you’re making “unearned” income and we need to take more of that from you to pay for our big government programs.

Terrence Jeffrey has the details from Obamascare 2.0:

“Under current law, workers who earn a salary pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,” says the summary.

Fairness?! The Redistributor in Chief wants to go there? Seriously?

Right now, the people who earn very little, or nothing, get way more back in Medicare than they’ve ever paid in and there is no income cap on the Medicare tax. The rich are already paying more than their “fair share.” In addition the money being used to make unearned income has already been taxed at least once.

The Wall Street Journal points out the unprecedented nature of the taxes and how anti-growth it is:

This new ObamaCare bargain would for the first time apply the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to “interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents,” so-called passive income that we are told includes capital gains, though the latter wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the proposal. This antigrowth investment tax would apply to singles earning more than $200,000 and joint filers over $250,000 and comes on top of the Senate’s 0.9-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax, which would bring the combined employee-employer share to 3.8%

Hey, wait a second, didn’t Obama say he wouldn’t raise any tax on families making less than $250k/year?

Single moms and dads making over $200k are going to be slapped with this. Obama hates single parent families!

More on the “fairness” issue: The Tax Foundation does an annual survey of US attitudes on tax and wealth. In their 2006 survey, more than two thirds of the people said no one should pay more than 20% of their income in taxes. That includes state, federal and local taxes. Of course, the top federal income tax rate for 2008 was 35%. That means most Americans believe “the rich” are taxed too much right now. If every American truly understood how excessive our taxation has already become we could create a tax revolution. (I understand we’re talking about payroll Medicare taxes and not income taxes, here, but it all goes into the tax debate. )

These new taxes will have a huge, negative impact on job growth. When will the lefties learn that whatever you tax you will get less of? This is another step into turning Medicare into a welfare program. STOP!

Three-fifths to two-thirds of the federal budget consists of taking property from one American and giving it to another. Were a private person to do the same thing, we’d call it theft. When government does it, we euphemistically call it income redistribution, but that’s exactly what thieves do — redistribute income.

–Walter Williams.

Here’s the latest episode of The Recap, my humorous, conservative look at the week in politics. Watch it, rate it and send it to your friends. Enjoy.