Union bosses are having a get-together with the president today to discuss his broken promise not to tax those families who make less than $250,000. They will meet behind closed doors, violating the promise to C-SPAN that we’d watch them all sit around a big table to work out the details. But for tough guys, these Big Labor fellas seem awfully wimpy, as this report explains:
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), told The Hill on Friday that the final bill would likely include some form of the excise tax.“When you have a president who says he wants to incorporate it and a Senate that says it wants to incorporate it and some in the House who say they want to incorporate it, it’s hard to look that in the face and say we can just win this outright,” Stern said.
I wonder how their members feel about that. Millions and millions of dollars were taken from union members’ pockets to be spent in direct contributions and soft-money expenditures to elect Democrats to Congress and Obama to the White House. And what they get for that is nothing — worse than nothing. Union members already have health care. What they’re now going to get are tax increases. Or perhaps they’ll instead see those generous health-care benefits slashed to avoid the excise tax (so much for “guaranteeing” to keep the health plan you have). Meanwhile, unemployment is in double digits and employers aren’t anxious to hire anyone — union or nonunion. What exactly have union members gotten from Washington and from their own leaders?
And if union leaders succeed in trimming the tax, if not eliminating it, what then? Well, other Americans are going to get smacked because the money has to come from somewhere:
The Senate bill would raise about $150 billion from 2013 to 2019 by taxing employer-provided health plans costing more than $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for families. Labor officials, citing an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, claim this would hit nearly 31 million households by 2019. But limiting the excise tax would require Senate and House negotiators to find alternative sources of revenue to fund healthcare reform.
Who’s the likely victim? Well, it seems that “labor leaders may push for a bigger increase in the Medicare Hospital Insurance tax.” Because we haven’t stuck it to health-care providers or endangered the fiscal viability of Medicare enough, I suppose.
Well, Democrats are bound and determined to push something through. Now the only question, it seems, is determining which groups will hate the bill more: union members, seniors, young people (forced to buy insurance), the Left, the Right, good-government types, independents, or tax-hike opponents. So many groups, so many grievances.
