Josh Barro, Columnist

Obamacare's Original Sin

President Barack Obama made two big promises during his first term that have tied his economic agenda in a straitjacket.

May 28, 2013 at 9:28 PM UTC

By Josh Barro

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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President Barack Obama made two big promises during his first term that have tied his economic agenda in a straitjacket.

One was his mostly-kept pledge not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- that is, 98 percent of Americans. The other was his promise about health care reform: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."