Fool Us Once, Shame On Us. Fool Us A Dozen Times, You’re Barack Obama.

You might remember during the Presidential campaign that John McCain proposed a fairly bold health care plan that would have involved a tax on the employer-based portion of your health care benefits. Barack Obama attacked it almost immediately with a commercial that was patently dishonest. He excoriated John McCain for being “so radical, so out of touch with what you’re facing, and so out of line with our basic values” and said this about the plan:

He loves to talk about his tax credit. But what he doesn’t tell you is that he taxes health care benefits for the first time in history. Millions lose the health care that they have. And millions more will pay for the health care that they get. It’s the same approach President Bush road-tested a few years ago. But if John McCain were to succeed where George Bush failed, it could have disastrous results.
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Well, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think we should settle for health care that works better for drug and insurance companies than it does for hard working Americans. I don’t think that’s the change we need. We can do better than that.

Got that? Taxes on health care benefits back in October and November were “out of touch”, “radical”, and “disastrous”. It was not the change we needed. We could do better.

That was then, when the President and the Democratic Party had to at least pretend they didn’t like jacking our taxes through the roof. Since Election Day, though, the Democrats have not hesitated to remind us that they won.

The new line today is, unlike four months ago, we apparently can’t do better than John McCain’s plan. In fact, we are likely to do a lot worse.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.

It will be worse because Congress is not at all disposed to giving tax credits to offset those tax increases, as John McCain had proposed. This health care tax, when it is proposed, will just go to fund yet another expensive, inefficient, unsustainable, totalitarian-government program just like Democrats have been pushing for 60 years.

Both Michelle Malkin and Monique Stuart (via Stacy) ask if there’s anything this President won’t tax.

Of course there isn’t. Barack Obama has never been anything more than a garden-variety progressive ideologue, indistinguishable from tens of thousands of others except for his exceptional ability to recite soaring speeches from a teleprompter. We can hardly be surprised today to find that he is who we thought he was.

Tags: Health Care, Michelle Malkin, Monique Stuart, President Barack Obama, Progressives, Taxes