Matt Drudge wants all of his minions to know he's standing for liberty by including a payment for estimated taxes on his 2014 first quarter return for the ACA penalty for choosing to be uninsured.
Ah, liberty. That thing we have in this country that allows moochers like Drudge to suck off the public teat by leveraging our own humanity. Drudge is banking on our collective decision as a society to reject letting people drop dead in the streets or rot away in their homes without access to health care, because liberty.
Matt Drudge may be entitled to his "liberty," but he isn't entitled to a pass on his irresponsible and costly decision to forego health insurance to spike his site's traffic.
I assume Matt Drudge is a sole proprietor in 2014 with no employees. I'm guessing the people he lists as "helpers" receive payment as freelancers and file their own returns, so Drudge files his own return and pays estimated taxes on what he will owe only for himself.
Ninety-five dollars - $95.00 or 1 percent
That's the maximum amount of penalty payable at the end of 2014 for failure to have health insurance and probably less than Drudge spends on dinner out giggling over how he screwed that dude in the White House with his big idea to pre-pay it in the first quarter of 2014.
On the other hand, if he does actually have employees as part of his sole proprietorship, he's not subject to the employer mandate at all, unless he has over 50 employees. Even then, the mandate doesn't hit until the end of 2015. He would still owe for his personal failure to get insurance, but that personal failure would cost him exactly $95.00 or 1 percent of a portion of his income, up to the average cost of a bronze policy. No more and no less.
But if Drudge should find himself taken ill or in an accident and unable to continue to run the small empire he has built, taxpayers will pick up his tab, as will those of us who chose to be insured even when it cost us every penny we saved before the ACA protections were effective. In the end, we still live in a society that still believes it's wrong to tell him to die in the street.
The mandate penalty isn't a "liberty tax." It's a small contribution to the Matt Drudge and Followers Moochers' Fund to help defray the costs for those people who decide they're just going to be a burden on the rest of us and not hold up their individual responsibility to get covered.
Matt Drudge is no libertarian. He's a moocher.
Update: According to a comment left by Demochristian, Matt Drudge is worth $90 million. If that's the case, he either has the worst tax advisors ever, or else he's a Subchapter S corporation that passes through income after expenses to individual owners as though they were self-employed. I'm guessing the latter, if only to isolate Matt Drudge, the individual, from the liability of running a site like his.
That means that he could well afford to insure himself and his employees through the corporation, but has decided not to so he can keep as much for himself as possible. Instead of whining, he ought to be grateful he lives in a country that lets him twist facts and lie as much as possible for fun and profit.
Note: Article was edited to correct the amount of the individual mandate penalty for 2014.
