Rush Confirms: There Is No Mandate!

Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picked up on the theme of a post I did last night: Delay the Mandate? What Mandate? Since the IRS is prohibited by law from doing anything to collect the fine, or tax, if you don’t buy health insurance, the alleged mandate is illusory. You can read Rush’s riff at his web site. Rush read the same quote from the Joint Tax Committee that I quoted in my post, and added:

[T]he only way that they can collect the penalty or the fine is by taking money from your refund. If you are not owed a refund, they cannot get money from you. They can’t issue a lien. They can’t garnish your wages. They can’t use any of the normal procedures available to them if you owe them money, even though the Supreme Court has said it’s a tax. So for those of us — I mean, folks, I’m in fat city. I’m in fat city because I always structure to where I owe money. Well, not entirely. There have been years. But if you structure your taxes so that you do not get a refund, you do not have to buy insurance and you do not have to pay a fine ’cause they can’t collect it from you if you don’t have a refund due. And that is just another nail in the coffin of Obamacare imploding on itself.

Rush finishes with a link to my post.

Along the way, he also talked about the raw deal that young people are getting from the Democratic Party:

And in three or four years, if things don’t change, it’s gonna be bad. I’ll tell you, by then, if this thing goes forward, and it looks like it may not, but, if it goes forward, these are gonna be the good old days, because right now with the website broken, these kids can’t find out how badly they’re gonna get screwed, although some people are. By kids I mean 18-24, 18-30.

For a fuller development of that theme, check out Manhattan Contrarian, a good web site written by a lawyer at a top New York firm. His post is titled, “When Will The Young Figure Out They Are Getting Taken?” He begins by asking, what, in substantive terms, was the outcome of the recent government shutdown?

Every last government program has been defended until some time early next year, entitlements continue merrily on their unsustainable growth path, the cash basis deficit is almost $1 trillion and the accrual-basis deficit is more like $5+ trillion, and Obamacare is now launched. All of this amounts to a Ponzi scheme where the benefits owed to the old are accelerating and the new entrants — the young — have to pay more and more the longer it continues, with little prospect that the scheme can survive long enough for today’s young ever to get their due.

And yet. What age cohort gave Barack Obama and the Democrats the largest share of the vote in the 2012 election? That would be the 18 – 29 cohort, which according to the Huffington Post here went 60 – 36 for Obama. These would be the people who already have to pay for Social Security and Medicare for the baby boom generation, who are bearing the lion’s share of the now over $1 trillion in student loan debt, non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and who are about to get hit with Obamacare. Why are these people voting overwhelmingly for the defenders of the Ponzi scheme status quo? Hello? …

And into this mix, throw Obamacare. Here again, almost all of the reporting is about who gains or loses from the problem of the day. But a longer view says that today’s website problems are far less important that the attempt at yet another huge chunk of generational theft from the young to the old. Have the twentysomethings really been fooled into believing that you can add tens of millions of people to the ranks of those with access to healthcare, not add any doctors, hospitals, or other health providers to the system, and everyone’s healthcare costs will go down? People, the whole idea here is that twentysomethings are to be forced to pay double or triple or quadruple the fair cost of health insurance so that the money can be transferred to others who are older and less healthy.

All of this is, or should be, blindingly obvious. But our news organizations, on which most people rely, have engaged for years in a program of disinformation.

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