Before the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, the
principal GOP lines of attack against the law were hyperbolic, but
subjective: government takeover of health care, unconstitutional
overreach, etc.
From the moment the Court determined the law stands as an exercise of
Congress’ taxing power, though, Republicans have gone empirical. They
now say that if the mandate is a tax, then it’s one of the greatest tax
hikes in history.
In the wake of the decision, Rush Limbaugh said, “what we now have is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world.”
But when you compare the projected revenue effect of the individual
mandate to the actual revenue effects of other, actually large tax
increases, the claim becomes laughable.
We used the Treasury Department’s four-year data on the revenue
effects of large tax increases signed by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush
and Bill Clinton; along with CBO projections of the revenue effect of
the mandate adjusted for its GDP projections during the mandate’s first
four years.
The mandate is tiny by comparison. Not, as Scott Walker warned, a “massive tax increase on the people of Wisconsin and America.”
As others have noted,
even if you include the sum total of all the revenue-raising provisions
in the ACA — and there are many taxes in it — it’s still smaller than
the Reagan, Bush and Clinton tax increases
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