Another rank deal
By Rich Lowry, New York Post
What happens when the irresistible force of the Democratic urge to tax runs up against the immovable object of Democratic loyalty to the labor unions? Another ugly deal in a health-care bill that already was a grotesquerie of payoffs to favored politicians and interests.
The levy in question is a 40 percent excise tax on high-end employer-provided insurance plans that -- typically -- has been sold as a tax on "the rich."
It's called the "Cadillac tax," a name redolent of corporate executives cackling in their Escalades over their cushy benefits. The unions, which make it a point to negotiate generous insurance plans with their employers (to the point of bankrupting them), were chagrined to learn that for purposes of this tax, they're among the rich.
They howled in terms that could have been drawn from Henry Hazlitt's free-market classic "Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics."
The excise tax is supposed to be paid by evil insurers and employers. Except in this one case affecting their self-interest directly, the unions see through the fiction and understand that the tax will trickle down onto them. How disorienting to hear unions implicitly recognize that corporations ultimately don't pay taxes, their customers and employees do.
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