Soda may be taxed to help pay for healthcare reform

  As a candidate Barack Obama promised that 95% of Americans would not see a tax increase of any kind,his words not mine. To quote Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, “you are lying your ass off.” He has already broken that promise because I am pretty sure that more than just the top five percent of the wage earners smoke cigarettes and he has already raised the cigarette tax. Thusly he has broken his promise.

  And now there is the very real chance that he could break his promise once again on an even larger portion of the United States population. Government officials are seriously eyeing a tax on soda and other sugary drinks, this new tax will affect much more than just the top five percent in wage earners and an even greater percentage of the American people than the cigarette tax increase affected.

  The tax would be imposed to help pay for what I thought was supposed to be free healthcare. According to the government spin in addition to helping to pay for healthcare reform this tax would have the secondary benefit of helping to steer the American people towards a better lifestyle. This administration loves to create crisis in order to implement their agenda; the so-called healthcare crisis is a perfect example and now the administration is looking to couple the healthcare crisis with the obesity crisis in an attempt to regulate behavior and implement government run healthcare.

  The government should not be in the business of regulating the people’s behavior. One of the lesser known founding fathers, John Dickinson, knew this and understood the different reasons for taxation when he wrote about the difference between taxes meant to raise revenue and taxes raised to regulate the people. He claimed that taxes designed to regulate the people were illegitimate and insidious.

  Yet here we are all of these years later, the sacrifice of our founding fathers forgotten and the lessons that they learned shunned. If only more Americans would take the time to read the Federalist papers, the anti-federalist papers, the Declaration, Common Sense, and all of the other founding documents they would realize that we are falling back into the same type of government that the founders fought so hard to rid us of.