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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (23853)	6/28/2012 5:24:05 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

And yes they do, as I demonstrated to you and as everyone has conceded forever. No they don't (if you respect the words of the constitution, although in practical terms they do) You demonstrated no such thing. And I'm far from alone in my opinion on this. Congress has the constitional power to take virtually everything you own as a tax. They could tax income, or any form of trade or commercial transaction at very high rates (maybe even at 100% or even beyond, unless rates that high are considered takings). They could also impose direct taxes that are "apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers". And those taxes can be quite high as well. So they certainly have the power to grab huge amounts of money from people. But those are the only type of taxes granted to them by the constitution. Before the 16th amendment they could only have indirect/excise taxes (sales and transaction taxes), or taxes apportioned among the states based on their populations, then the 16th added income taxes. Supreme Court Decisions can be rather dense (although likely not nearly as dense as the law that was ruled on in this instance), but I think I'll go ahead and take a look at it, to see if Roberts details what taxing power is involved here. It seems to be a new invention of his own, but he might claim its based off of some other specific recognized taxing power.