Confiscating All Income Earned by CBPP Employees Could Help Pay for Health Reform

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) doesn’t even seem to be trying lately, as evidenced by the titles of their recent reports:

• Increasing Medicare Tax on High-Wage Earners Could Help Pay for Health Reform
• Curbing Flexible Spending Accounts Could Help Pay For Health Care Reform
• Taxing High-Sugar Soft Drinks Could Help Pay For Health Care Reform
• Reversing the Erosion in Alcohol Taxes Could Help Pay for Health Care Reform
• Reducing Medicaid and Medicare Drug Costs Could Help Pay For Health Reform
• Maintaining Current Value of Itemized Deductions For High-Income Taxpayers Could Help Pay For Health Care Reform
• An Excise Tax on Insurers Offering High-Cost Plans Can Help Pay for Health Reform
• Limiting the Tax Exclusion for Employer-Sponsored Insurance Can Help Pay for Health Reform
• High-Income Surcharge Can Help Pay for Health Reform

C’mon, CBPP. Whether a proposal will raise revenue that “could help pay for health care reform” says nothing about whether it’s good policy or not. Otherwise, CBPP would just support anything that increased revenue, no matter how terrible an idea. As I note in the title, if we grabbed every CBPP employee by the ankles and shook them, the cash that falls to the ground “could help pay for health care reform.” But it’d be bad policy.

Similarly, today CBPP’s Michael Mazerov denounced Amazon.com’s efforts to challenge a New York tax as unconstitutional, on the grounds that Amazon.com’s refusal to knuckle under and comply “hurts state and local governments’ ability to finance education, health care, and other services.” Well, if the states passed an unconstitutional law confiscating CBPP’s property without just compensation, I’m sure they would rightly protest. Even though such a protest “hurts state and local governments’ ability to finance education, health care, and other services.”

More on why the Amazon.com tax is unconstitutional and unwise here.