Will wonders never cease: Democrats discover taxes hurt businesses!

How cute: Fifteen Democratic senators who voted for Obamacare back in 2009 are asking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to see that the excise tax on medical devices is not implemented for now.

Read their letter here. It ticks all the usual boxes for the kind of anti-tax arguments that Democrats typically reject out of hand:

• The industry “directly employs over 400,000 people in the United States and is responsible for a total of two million high-skilled manufacturing jobs.”
• The industry “is also one of the few that enjoys a net trade surplus…”
• Our economy has a need for “increasing exports, promoting small businesses, and growing high-tech manufacturing jobs for the future…”
• The slapdash way in which Obamacare was constructed, with major decisions punted to an unaccountable bureaucracy to make (OK, that’s not exactly how the senators put it), has caused “significant uncertainty and confusion for businesses.”
• Rather than moving forward with another punitive tax on a particular industry, it would be preferable “to develop a long-term solution to help move our economy forward, reduce our debt and reform our tax code…”
• Not moving forward with this tax “will benefit patients, innovators and boost our country’s economic growth.”

All of which are arguments that would have been helpful for these Democrats to make three years ago when they were rushing to pass Obamacare in the first place. Conservatives made these very same arguments at the time, only to have Democrats ram the law through Congress anyway.

It turns out that some of these senators represent states where the medical-device industry is particularly important. I guess they had to pass the bill to find out what was in it.

– By Kyle Wingfield

Find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter