Revealed: ObamaCare Enlightenment – Part 3

PJM discovers the “wedding and family tax” in Obamacare…

Obamacare’s ‘Cool Calculator,’ Part 2: The ‘Wedding Tax’- Better off divorced and shacking up.

In a September 13 email, Erin Hannigan of Organizing for Action’s “Truth Team” bragged about a “cool calculator from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation” showing how Obamacare’s “tax credits” work, and encouraged everyone to “share it on Facebook or Twitter.”

Obamacare’s opponents, especially those who advocate defunding it before it goes live, need to follow Hannigan’s suggestion, and even embed it on their websites and blogs. That’s because what Kaiser’s “cool calculator” really does is expose the statist health care regime’s three ugliest financial elements.

I covered two of them in my previous PJM column. The first is that, when combined with Uncle Sam’s current income and payroll tax regimes, the gradual expiration as income increases of Obamacare’s “tax credits” — which Kaiser’s model schizophrenically describes as “government tax credit subsidies” — will raise the portion of income taken by the government for each additional dollar of earnings to between one-third and one-half, effectively taxing most American workers at marginal rates usually limited to the planet’s highest income earners. The second is that its subsidy “cliffs” will cause middle-aged single people and married couples making as little as $45,960 and $62,040, respectively, to lose over $10,000 in subsidies — or “tax credits,” in the preferred language of OFA and the U.S. Supreme Court’s — when they earn just one additional dollar. These bugs, which jubilant “progressives” as seen above apparently believe are features, will crush incentives to work and to otherwise pursue financial self-improvement.

The third tragic outcome of Obamacare is what it will do to marriages and families. In January 2010, two months before Obamacare’s passage, the estimable Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation gave the impact a name: the “wedding tax.”

To illustrate, let’s start with the 60-year-old married couple with no children whose situation I illustrated at the end of Part 1:

If they have identical earnings totaling $65,000, which will usually net down to $50,000 or below after all income and payroll taxes, their Obamacare exchange Silver Plan premium next year with the same earnings will be $16,382, or about one-third of what used to be their take-home pay. (And they call it the “Affordable Care Act”?)

What can this couple do? Well, they could decide to earn a few thousand dollars less, which will negate the five-figure premium hit. Encouraging ordinarily willing workers to put in less effort isn’t good in any economy, but especially not this one. But if either spouse’s earnings are unpredictable or hard to precisely track, they could still “mess up” and get socked with a premium they can’t afford.

The “easiest” solution would be to avoid the “wedding tax” entirely by getting divorced while still living together…

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Here is PJM Tom Blumer’s previous article (cited within the above article): “Obamacare’s ‘Cool Calculator,’ Part 1: Work Disincentives Like We’ve Never Seen Before” – For many Americans, an extra dollar in income means thousands more in Obamacare payments

MORE:

‘Affordable’ Care Act Raises One Man’s Premium by $632 A Month

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