Romney on Health Care Tax There's a great Saturday Night Live skit from 1976, in which Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner argue over whether a new product called "Shimmer" is a floor wax or a dessert topping. Chevy Chase intervenes to point out that it's a floor wax AND a dessert topping. That skit kept coming back to me as I read coverage of Mitt Romney's comical flip-flopping on health care. His views on the fine that eventually will be imposed on people who refuse to buy health insurance are remarkably versatile: sometimes it's a "penalty," other times a "tax." Last week, the Romney campaign didn't want to call the fine a "tax," probably because Mr. Romney himself imposed such a penalty as part of the health care reform he got enacted in Massachusetts. That reform, of course, is the template for President Obama's program. That caused a lot of bother among what's left of the Republicans to his right. So on Wednesday, Mr. Romney celebrated the nation's independence by abandoning his. He contrived an interview so he could say, twice, that the new penalty for not buying health insurance is a tax. This has to be one of the silliest arguments in a political season that has been filled with them, but it has been raging since the Supreme Court ruling last week, which turned on what powers Congress has to pass social-welfare legislation. The court said President Obama's health-care reform law did not pass muster as an exercise of Washington's power to regulate commerce, but it was constitutional under the congressional power to tax, which is pretty unlimited. Right-wingers jumped all over this, proclaiming falsely that health care reform is a huge tax on the middle class, and that Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress lied about that to the American people. I kept wondering why the tax thing never occurred to these same Republicans before, and if it did, why they kept that from the American people. The answer seems obvious - they thought that denouncing the new requirement as a "mandate" would make it more likely that the Supreme Court would strike it down. They just ignored the fact that everyone in Congress knew that the penalty is a tax you can avoid paying. And they knew that the administration made that very argument in its case before the Supreme Court. It wasn't exactly a secret. You can look it up online. Mr. Romney proclaimed that "the Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it's a tax, so it's a tax. Last week, of course, Mr. Romney's allies on the right were denouncing the court for over-reaching, so he may have to flip flop on that one, too. But let's assume for the moment that he is sincere. That must mean that he would agree that the Supreme Court has resolved matters such as whether women have a constitutional right to privacy that includes having an abortion (it has said they do, but Mr. Romney still thinks abortion should be illegal) and whether states have the right to execute mentally retarded people (it has said they do not, but Georgia is still planning to do precisely that). Or maybe he'll just keep trying to serve us floor wax for dessert.