Like King George II

Investors Business Daily

Posted 06:57 PM ET

Big Government: Like King George III, ObamaCare has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of IRS agents and regulators to harass our people and eat out their substance. A second revolution is needed.

We paraphrase these words from the Declaration of Independence as a reminder of what spawned this country's independence — an oppressive governance that would give rise to the original Tea Party in Boston — and as a reminder of President Reagan's dictum that the demise of the liberty we fought for and cherish is never more than a generation away.

The price of liberty today is eternal vigilance and the oppressiveness of ObamaCare, which got a stay of execution from the Supreme Court, is proving every day that the devil is indeed in the details. The individual mandate, ruled a constitutional tax, is only a part of the regulatory and tax iceberg we're about to hit.

The Health and Human Services Department "was given a billion dollars (of) implementation money," Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana notes. "That money is gone already on additional bureaucrats and (information technology) programs, computerization for the implementation."

ObamaCare, the legislation that replaced the "We the People" of the Constitution with the insidious phrase, "the Secretary shall determine," which appears in the bill a mind-boggling 1,563 times, is still being written.
"There's already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they're not even done yet," says Rehberg.

The Orwellian-named Affordable Health Care Act is a "delegation of extensive authority from Congress to the Department of Health and Human Services and a lot of boards and commissions and bureaus throughout the bureaucracy," adds Matt Spalding of the Heritage Foundation. "We counted about 180 or so."

"The fact of the matter is the mandate is about 2% of the whole piece of the legislation," says Spalding. "It's a minor part."

Indeed, as we've written, ObamaCare, now called ObamaTax after the Supreme Court decision, contains 21 new or higher taxes. Seven of those taxes apply to individuals making $250,000 or less.

The Medical Itemized Deduction Hurdle, a direct hit to the "greedy free-riders" of the middle class, is now set at 7.5% of adjusted gross income. ObamaCare raises this hurdle to 10% starting in 2013. This must be the "affordable" part of the Affordable Health Care Act.

Is ObamaCare really a tax? As Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform notes, the individual mandate, "the tax on your failure to cooperate, is collected by the Internal Revenue Service. The rules are written in the Internal Revenue Code. The tax is paid on your 1040 federal income tax return. And the Congressional Budget Office takes the money and counts it as tax revenue pouring into the general fund."

The new tax mandates and penalties in ObamaCare will require up to 16,500 new IRS personnel to collect, examine and audit new tax information mandated on families and small businesses, according to an analysis by the Joint Economic Committee and the then-minority GOP staff of the House Ways & Means Committee in 2010.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said that we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it. The terrible truth is that we still do not know and may never finally know as more new regulations are added with each new day.

What will the next HHS secretary "determine?"

As we recently celebrated the 236th anniversary of our liberation from the taxation of King George III without representation, we find this new, hidden taxation with representation not much better.

A second American Revolution is needed in November as it is clear the only way to repeal ObamaCare is to repeal Obama.