Make Up Your Mind GOP Part 3

Posted on July 5, 2012 at 3:00 pm by JM Ashby

Following nearly a week of incoherent and contradictory statements, the Republicans may have finally come to an agreement on whether or the individual mandate is a penalty or a tax.

Or rather, Mitt Romney may have finally agreed to agree with his colleagues in the conservative blogosphere and congress that it is a tax.

In an interview with CBS News, aired on Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney reversed himself and got in line with the GOP’s new talking point: That the individual mandate of the 2010 landmark health-care law is “a tax.”

Romney’s statements in this interview contradict remarks made on Monday by one of his senior campaign advisers, Eric Ferhnstrom, that Romney believed the mandate was a “penalty,” not a tax.

In summary, this is how the past week transpired:

Republicans: It’s a tax.

OFA: No, it’s a penalty.

Republicans: No, it’s the “biggest tax in history.”

Team Romney: No, it’s a penalty.

Republicans: No, it’s absolutely a tax.

Team Romney: Okay, it’s a tax.

Presidential.

I suppose we should thank the Rabid Right for forcing Mitt Romney to admit that he raised taxes while he was governor. Good job.

Print Friendly
This entry was posted in Wingnuts and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • Brutlyhonest

    I almost shit myself last night when the cbs interviewer actually asked rmoney real questions (of course she didn’t challenge any of his made up numbers). The BS answer they have now concocted is that roberts, in the written opinion, specifies that states have different powers so it’s a penalty when a state does it but a tax at the federal level. If it’s true, it’s the kind of thing that the “what the definition of “is” is” crowd would be howling about IF it was said by a Democrat.

    The smirk on his face and the barely contained glee over saying that something would cost middle-class citizens more was despicable, as usual.

  • http://mdblanche.myopenid.com/ mdblanche

    The mandate is both a tax and a penalty. At the macroscopic federal level, it appears to be a wave of taxes with its penalty features not apparent. At the quantum state level, however, it can be seen to take the form of discrete penalties. If you cut two slits in your tax forms and pass the Romney campaign’s talking points through them one at a time, you can see them interfere with each other in a such a way to make this tax/penalty duality clear.