"tax" or "penalty"?

[Jonathan Lighter]

It isn't exactly a tax and it isn't exactly a penalty. That's the point. To
say, as the Court did, that it's Constitutional under the taxing power of
Congress, isn't quite the same as saying it's a tax precisely like other
taxes. It's saying that it's more like a traditional tax levied by Congress
through the IRS than it is a innovative penalty imposed under the commerce
clause. Those were the choices.

The semantic issue isn't whether the individual mandate is good or whether
it will work or anything else. The issue is that to label it as simply a
"tax" *or* a "penalty" is to cram it unreasonably into a prefab category
that will not fir precisely. That is an elementary freshman-level error in
reasoning.

Like every other 5-4 SCOTUS opinion, a different court might have decided
differently.  A law isn't deemed Constutional because the Court's had a
Revelation from the Realm of Pure Forms; it's Constitutional because
a majority of nine of the presumably sharpest legal minds available have so
decided, based on their professional expertise and interpretation of the
arguments. Constitutional is as Constitutional does.

To think otherwise is to indulge in another freshman-level error, except
this time in the realm political science. The media and the
pols encourage these errors on the KISS principle, the bedrock of all
politics and journalism.


JL

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "tax" or "penalty"?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It seems to me that, since penalties are unconstitutional and taxes are
> constitutional, it's a distinction with a difference, and something worthy
> of getting hung up on.
>
> DanG
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 8:22 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      "tax" or "penalty"?
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Every commentator I've seen on TV (and I watch a hell of a lot),  whether
> > right or left, pol or journo, expert or otherwise, is passionately hung
> up
> > on the question of whether the inidividual mandate is a "tax" or a
> > "penalty."
> >
> > What's remarkable is that *nobody* has been able to utter the simple
> truth
> > that "It's like a penalty in some ways and like a tax in others."
> >
> > Is this a political, a journalistic, a semantic, or a brain problem? Or
> all
> > of the above?
> >
> > OK, don't answer that.  But the point is, in media journalism, don't
> > address the issue if you can address the label instead.
> >
> > JL
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
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> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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