@roger,
roger wrote:I was just using it as an example of the government pulling itself in opposite directions. In the old health care discussion, I probably noted the desired goal of universal health care and the intent to remove tax favored treatment of employer assisted health insurance.
They're just the kind of thing that catches my notice.
I have never understood the logic of the government allowing employers to pay for health insurance for employees and not consider that as income. For example would it make sense for a company to provide homeowners insurance or auto insurance for the employees personal cars? One could also ask, if health insurance is allowed, why not groceries and housing? I guess some jobs do provide housing, come to think of it.
The point of this whole thing is that as a conservative, I strongly believe that we should be consistent with our tax code, and if we are going to tax income, income can obviously come in the form of many things, including cash, health care insurance, housing, in fact anything that has value. Anything that is received of value by an employee should be taxable. If the government wishes to grant tax credits for medical expenses, including insurance, or other things, they can do it on the personal income tax returns. For people to learn ways around paying income tax on stuff, it is not fair and it is illogical. For a very long time, I have been self employed and have had to realize for a long time that corporations and corporate employees obtained breaks on employee provided medical insurance, that I could not take advantage of. In more recent years, the code has been changed to make it fairer, but for a long time, it was not.
I think McCain actually proposed during the campaign that employee provided insurance premiums should be taxed, which I agreed with. McCain actually showed some common sense, but unfortunately not only did Democrats attack him for this, so did many Republicans.
