Word: taxed
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...value of employer-provided health benefits is not included in employees' taxable income. Making a portion of these benefits taxable, Bush the Elder reckoned, was a smart way to pay for health care for folks who had none. But G.O.P. leaders were apoplectic. Didn't Bush understand that a tax hike meant political death? The uproar was so swift and furious that White House staffers spent the night using razor blades to excise the offending page from printed budgets...
...Baghdad when his daddy wouldn't. Now, with the health-care plan the President floated in his State of the Union address, he's literally picking up a page his father wouldn't keep in his health-care playbook. But the son has shrewdly disguised his slow-motion tax increase as a tax...
Here's how. To make health care more affordable, Bush wants to create a standard deduction for health insurance like the one offered for dependents. Families with private health plans would have their first $15,000 in earnings exempt from taxes (for individuals, it's $7,500). The idea, Bush argued sensibly Wednesday night, is to "level the playing field" between today's tax-advantaged employer-provided benefits and those purchased outside the workplace, where growing numbers of Americans seek coverage. But Bush would offset these new deductions by taxing employer-provided benefits above that...
Still, if Democrats are right to dismiss Bush's overall plan as too little, too late, they're wrong to dis his call to reform today's regressive health-tax exclusion. A nearly invisible $200 billion subsidy that tilts its largesse toward executives in high tax brackets and workers who already have rich plans would normally be assailed by liberals as unjust. But because this particular subsidy bolsters hefty benefits negotiated by their union allies, Democrats overlook the inequity. "It's ironic and embarrassing," says Len Nichols, a former Clinton health official now at the New America Foundation. Farsighted Democrats...
Bush's nervy war on our wrongheaded health-tax subsidy will probably go nowhere, but it's destined to be revived if Democrats get a shot at comprehensive reform after 2008. Even a President as unpopular as Herbert Hoover probably had a good idea or two eventually to steal...