Republican lawmakers may have hit a brick wall in their drive to do away with Obamacare, but newly elected U.S. Rep. Karen Handel, R-Ga., stands firm on the need to repeal the health care bill. At a recent telephone town hall, a voter asked why she was not a fan of repairing the Affordable Care Act.
“The issue with quote ‘repairing the Affordable Care Act’ is the fact that it has so many taxes in it,” Handel said Aug. 30. “In fact, the Affordable Care Act is the single largest tax increase in my lifetime history. You can’t repair a tax. You have to repeal it. You have to get rid of it.”
A reader asked us if the tax hike in the 2010 health care law was as large as Handel said.
Handel was born in 1962, so we looked at the research on every major tax bill passed since then.
We reached out to Handel’s office to learn the source behind her statement and did not hear back.
We looked at the scale of the Affordable Care Act taxes and found that Handel is mistaken. In terms of the dollar amounts, there were three years that topped the Obamacare tax increases. Relative to the size of the economy (using the metric of the gross domestic product) six tax increases were higher.
Jerry Tempalski at the Office of Tax Analysis in the Treasury Department ran the numbers in 2013. He calculated the tax impacts of 28 tax bills between 1968 and 2013. To winnow out the effects of inflation, we used the figures he generated based on 2012 constant dollars. Tempalski found that for any given tax bill, the impact would change from year to year.
Frustration over the failed attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare leads some Republican leaders to focus on tax reform. (Inform) Republican lawmakers may have hit a brick wall in their drive to do away with Obamacare, but newly elected U.S. Rep. Karen Handel, R-Ga., stands firm on the need […]
Karen Handel wrongly says Obamacare tax increase largest ever in her lifetime
Republican lawmakers may have hit a brick wall in their drive to do away with Obamacare, but newly elected U.S. Rep. Karen Handel, R-Ga., stands firm on the need to repeal the health care bill. At a recent telephone town hall, a voter asked why she was not a fan of repairing the Affordable Care […]
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