No, they leave that to the Governor of Florida.
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Well, the undead DO have some special abilities, after all…
You can avoid the health care (tax/penalty) by simply having valid health insurance coverage. So, it’s a penalty, right?
If no, then how can we not construe failure to have auto insurance as a tax?
After reading the whole opinion, I still believe the dissent got it right. Roberts said that it COULD be construed as a tax, and since we have to take the interpretation that makes it constitutional instead of unconstitutional, we must proceed as if it was a tax.
That opinion completely ignores the idea that Congress didn’t impose the (penalty/tax) in order to raise revenue for the treasury. They did it to coerce people into buying health insurance. That part was obvious. They even referred to it as a penalty in the law.
As the dissent said, you can try to make it constitutional, but when it ain’t there, it just ain’t there. This was written as a penalty all along, albiet a very small penalty for political compromise purposes. It’s absurd to say that its a tax just because it is so small.
Penalties or taxes can be severe, moderate, or slight. Penalties can come without civil or criminal consequences, and can be collected by the IRS. A penalty NEVER becomes a tax because of a minimal punishment (at least not until last Thursday) and it certainly doesn’t become one when Congress bent over backwards to call it a penalty.
And it is a one way ratchet. A tax can be so onerous that it is really a penalty when the intent is shown that it was not to raise revenue but to regulate an activity. The logic doesn’t work the other way.
If a person believes that the speeding fines in his locality are too lax or too low, would he seriously refer to it as a tax on speeding? When the government collects less revenue than it “should” it is a tax? There is no logic behind this position. A parking fine of $500 is a penalty, but if it’s $10 it’s a tax?
Of course it ignores it. It’s well settled that the primary purpose of a tax need not be revenue generation, as long as it’s a purpose.
I’m not trying to be snarky, but tell me the difference between a tax and a penalty. Are they synonyms?
I know it wasn’t addressed to me, but there is at least one very obvious distinction directly from this case - a tax is subject to the Anti-Injunction Act but a penalty is not.
And no one is forced to run the risk of paying them. Just don’t own a car as tens of million of Americans do not. Also, those penalties are not collected by the IRS or state tax boards. You’re comparing apples and pineapples.
What happens if I fail to file a personal income tax return? Don’t I pay a penalty? And who collects it?
The Anti-Injunction Act is not irrevocable. If Congress wishes to pass a new tax that is exempt from said Act, there’s no reason they can’t.
That’s a good point, and pretty much exactly what the majority said, right? That since Congress didn’t use the word “tax” they didn’t mean for the AIA to apply. Completely separate from whether the penalty actually falls under the power to levy taxes.
Right. The ACA could’ve just as easily used the word “tax” and then contained a clause specifying “This tax shall not be subject to [insert statute here]”. By calling it a penalty they were implicitly doing the same thing. Perhaps the former would have been better wording, but legislation is not always worded perfectly. That’s why we have a common law system.
Sure, but I haven’t seen a good reason why it does not. The fact that the Act doesn’t use the word “tax” is not a good reason, IMO. If Congress passed a new tax tomorrow and called it a “blumpfizz”, it would still be a tax.
I agree, but as the dissent says, the wording is important when you are trying to determine whether it is a tax or a penalty.
If Congress said, that you must buy canned tuna or else pay a blumpfizz, that sounds like a penalty and not a tax, but the wording could be tortured to make it at tax. Conversely, if Congress said that there would be a 1% blumpfizz on the purchase of every alcoholic beverage. That sounds like a tax, and it is a tax no matter the wording, but you could torture the wording to say that it is a 1% penalty on purchasing alcohol.
If Congress said that you must buy canned tuna or else pay a penalty, that REALLY sounds like a penalty and not a tax, and it takes some linguistic jugging to try to say it is a tax. Likewise if Congress says you must buy canned tuna or pay a tax, that is a head scratcher because it sure sounds like a penalty for not buying tuna.
The point is that taxes and penalties are functionally equivalent (and conservatives have been saying this since Reagan). Do X or not do X and you have to pay money to the government.
The problem is, again as the dissent pointed out, the Supreme Court has a long history of applying legal terms of art to distinguish the two. Roberts cast all of that precedent aside to force this to be a tax when it is clearly a penalty for not purchasing health insurance.
“Tax” and “penalty” are not mutually exclusive words. Have you never heard the phrase “tax penalty” before? Up until this debate I’ve never heard anyone talk about a government-imposed “penalty” as if that were a legally distinct concept. Paying money to the government can come in the form of a tax, a fee, or a fine. “Penalty” is just a word Congress used in the Act. The penalty is structured like a tax, not a fee or fine.
So what if not having health insurance was punished by 1 day in jail each year. Penalty? Tax? Both?
1 day in jail and a $200 fine.
Penalty, tax, or both?
$200 fine only.
Penalty, tax, or both?
Death by lethal injection
Penalty, tax, or both?
So once ruled, they are never overturned?
Neither, that would be classifying it as a misdemeanor or felony. I guess you could call that a penalty in the abstract sense, but more specifically it’s a criminal penalty, which is not the same thing at all.
Neither again, that’s a fine. You really don’t see the difference between a fine and the tax penalty included in the ACA?
A police officer is not going to ask to see proof of health insurance and write you a ticket if you don’t have it. It is not going to be enforced by the courts. “Not having health insurance” has not been made an infraction.
That’s covered in junior high school Civics classes. :dubious:
They can change their minds, or the Constitution can be amended or the statute rewritten/repealed, but other than that, yes, SC rulings are final and definitive. That’s why they’re the Supreme Court.
They can overlap, to some degree. Cigarette taxes are just that, but they are partly punitive in intent. In this case, there is no non-monetary element, so it’s hard to say it isn’t a tax. Think about it: even a traffic citation carries the risk of jail time if you don’t pay it.
If a tax can actually be a penalty, then there must be some tipping point, even if we don’t tip-toe to it (which was only illustrative that some threshold exists). Whether it is different for every tax is just irrelevant. This is how we can show that taxes and penalties are different: beyond some point (which may be different for each purpose), a tax becomes a penalty or, in the other direction, a penalty becomes a tax. If we ignore the tipping point notion, then the identification of a tax as a penalty has already in itself addressed the possibility of a penalty being a tax, and the question is resolved.
I am merely trying to make sense of the notion that taxes can be penalties but penalties can’t be taxes. I find no coherence in it. If you want me to avoid making strawmen, then please offer me something that is substantive enough to show why a) the “tipping point” fundamentally doesn’t exist, or b) the very fact that we’ve identified a tax as a penalty doesn’t simultaneously point out that the penalty is or can be a tax. This is the dissent’s claim, that we see one but not the other, and it doesn’t make sense. Their argument is basically, “Well, no one’s ever said it that way.” This isn’t even an argument. If the set of all taxes and the set of all penalties overlaps, then the question is simply resolved and there is nothing to say. What force of gravity would they like to cite which says we can funnel As into Bs but not the other way? Do we need a supreme court case about speeding-traps-as-revenue-generators, or parking-tickets-as-revenue-generators, to finally put the issue to rest? (How would we get it there?)
Again, the tipping point argument is just there to try to make sense of the notion “a tax can be a penalty.” It is an answer to my question, “How?” Any answer to “how” I can imagine simultaneously shows that a penalty is or can be a tax. I have given two answers to the “how” question, which is two more than the dissent offered, and both answer their question. In my opinion, the reason the dissent did not even attempt to address this issue is because that particular objection would vanish.
Which I would agree with, if the dissent didn’t point out that there is some equivalence at least sometimes. Since they did, I want to know “How?” in a way that renders their objection meaningful. I can find no such interpretation.
Whether it is a coincidence or not, they put forward the position that a tax can be a penalty, and challenged others to find a case where a penalty was a tax. But that is a weird shifting of the burden. If we know how taxes can be penalties, then the question is already answered how penalties can be taxes.
It seems to me this portion is particularly important, if Robert’s justification was that the penalty was a tax (for the purposes of the constitution).
So, if I understand your position correctly, if a law prohibits something but only provides for a fine for violating it, and also provides no jail time for not paying the fine, then it becomes a tax? If a court decides that a penalty is too light, it becomes a tax?
IOW, lets say in 2017, Congress finds that people are openly flouting the ACA and just not paying the (penalty/tax) so they provide that a person not paying the ACA (penalty/tax) can be sentenced to 1 hour in jail. Does that mean that it goes back to SCOTUS and the WHOLE LAW is gone? That seems an absurd distinction to me.
Money and jail are both forms of punishment. A poor person would much rather spend a few days in jail than pay the ACA (tax/penalty).