Excise Tax Rabbit Hole revision #387: No one claimed 80% of revenue would come from wage increases [View All]

[Hello_Kitty]

That's the latest from the HCR supporters and "Cadillac" tax apologists. I was just imagining it when I read this:

Some important aspects of the tax are widely misunderstood. For one thing, an October 20 press release cites the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) as finding that the total number of individual and family plans impacted by the excise tax grows to 34% and 31% respectively by 2019. These numbers overstate the tax’s impact (see the box on page 2). For another, as the JCT analysis shows, over 80 percent of the revenue generated would come not from the tax on insurance premiums itself, but from income and payroll tax revenue on the tens of billions of dollars of higher wages that workers would receive — as employers modified their health plans to avoid the excise tax and converted what they had been spending for health coverage in excess of the tax thresholds into higher wages and salaries. Indeed, one largely overlooked side benefit of the proposal is that by receiving higher wages and paying somewhat more in payroll taxes, most affected workers would qualify for higher Social Security payments when they retire.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2957#_ftn11

I mean, that statement is still at the link but it's not really there because people are telling me that the JCT never said that and no one issued a press release saying they did and no one ever claimed that most of the revenue from the excise tax would come from increased wages so stop saying that.