ObamaCare's 1099 Tax Reporting Provision Gets the Ax

It's official: ObamaCare's new small business tax reporting requirement—the so-called 1099 provision—is no more, making it the first part of the law to be repealed. Good riddance. ObamaCare required small business owners to file an additional 1099 form with every other business that they did more than $600 in transactions with: The provision was supposed to raise about $17 billion in revenue over the next decade to help pay for all the new spending the law also called for. The repeal bill makes up for that revenue by taking money out of the law's middle class insurance subsidies. Why is that important? Because it shows how tough it is to find new revenue raisers; all the remote plausible ideas (and some not very plausible ones) for coming up with easy revenue got jammed into the health care overhaul. And now now, for the second time, Congress has chosen to eat into the law's subsidies in order to come up with money in order to pass some politically necessary measure (the first was with this year's 13-month extension of the doc fix). The law is already collapsing under its own weight.

President Obama made it known that he didn't like the pay-for used to make up the lost revenue. But he approved it it anyway, declaring in a signing statement that he was "pleased" to be able to help ensure that small business owners "spend their time and resources creating jobs and growing their business, not filling out more paperwork." That's a nice sentiment, I suppose. It would have been a lot nicer if he'd thought of it before he signed the damn provision into law in the first place.

I first noted the 1099 reporting provision last May.