Morning Examiner: Obamacare is a tax

Published July 5, 2012 4:00am ET



On Tuesday, we predicted that Mitt Romney senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom’s claims that Obamacare’s individual mandate was not a tax were “unsustainable.” Yesterday, Mitt Romney agreed. In an interview with CBS’ Jan Crawford, Romney said:

The Supreme Court has spoken, and while I agreed with the dissent, that’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said it’s a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that. … You can try and say you wish [the court] had decided a different way, but they didn’t. They concluded it was a tax; that’s what it is. And the American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made. He said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans, and not only did he raise the $500 billion that was already in the bill, it’s now clear that his mandate, as described by the Supreme Court, is a tax.

Good for Romney. This is the right position to take, and it speaks well of his judgment that he adopted this position so quickly.

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