The Associated Press reports the words of Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association, who went to Washington D.C. to protest the so-called Cadillac healthcare plan tax currently in the Senate’s healthcare bill. “We should tax the millionaires, not teachers and bus drivers,” she told reporters.

This has been the constant refrain from Big Unions since Senator Max Baucus (D, Montana) included the taxing plan into his Senate version of Obamacare earlier this year. This 40 percent tax plan would kick in for any employee whose healthcare plan reaches $8,500 per year for individuals or $23,000 for families.

Of course, there is a fatal flaw in the Democrat’s assumptions of what this tax will do. As the AP reports, “The tax would raise some $150 billion over 10 years to help pay for the Democrats’ nearly $1 trillion health care bill.”

The truth is, of course, that it would “raise” no such amount of taxes. All that would happen is that these sorts of plans would be phased out in order to avoid the tax and people would simply lose their coverage. Little of this tax boon would be realized by the federal government.

I spend a lot of time lambasting the unions, but in this instance they are 100% right. The membership of Big Labor has for years given up higher hourly raises in pay for better healthcare benefits and many of these union members would find that Obamacare is going to tax the heck out of their benefits.

Unions have already been successful in having this “Cadillac tax” edged higher so that it will hit fewer union members, but the issue should be not to make the threshold higher but to get rid of the whole failed idea.

So, in this I do oppose the unions goals with this tax. The higher the threshold goes the more this tax becomes simply punitive on the purported rich as it will not raise the “needed” revenue and the lower it goes the worse it will hurt Americans generally.

It is a bad idea all the way around and is just one more aspect of how Obamacare will hurt this country.

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