Baloney....The feds have been using taxes to punish behavior since the New Deal. Try buying an automatic weapon without buying a $200 TAX STAMP from the BATF. That was put in ONLY to secure the names of people buying the weapons and punish them for doing so. Has nothing whatsoever to do with “raising revenue”. It’s a stupid argument for us to make.
The Constitution enumerates only three indirect taxes: duty, impost and excise tax. The mandate penalty is not a duty or impost—it's not a tax on any object at all (unlike the tax on carriages that was the subject of HYLTON v. U S., which the Court decided was either a duty or an excise.) And it's not an excise tax—by definition, an excise tax can only be imposed on transactions or events that actually occur, not on ones that don't. To disprove that, cite any excise tax ever imposed on what didn't happen.
So if it's a tax, it can only be a direct tax. Per original intent, direct taxes were those imposed on states of being, and indirect taxes were imposed on objects, events or transactions. Roberts got that wrong, and misinterpreted both Springer and Hylton, both of which were about taxes levied either on events (excises) or objects (duties or imposts,) and not about taxes imposed on states of being.
Originally, income taxes were understood to be excise taxes that taxed transactions where income was earned. The Pollock decision reclassified income taxes on capital gains, rents, royalties, dividends and interest as direct taxes. The 16th Amendment exempted income tax on income generated by ownership of property from the requirement of apportionment among the States. That's one of the few things the Robert's opinion got right on the tax issue.