But purpose isn't often legally operational. When it comes to law, we instead check what a thing does or how it behaves to see what it is.
If you read any collection of statutes you'll see they're full of definitions and tests.
Now whatever the purpose of the fine in Obamacare is, it still passes the test (unfortunately) for a tax on income.
No, Judge Roberts. By your definition, all fees, fines and penalties are taxes. That’s a load of crap. Any difficulty separating taxes, fees, fines, and penalties can be removed by relying on the definition within the legislation itself:
>> In the dissent, Scalia1 says this is horseshit. The law itself repeatedly calls it a penalty, it’s not primarily designed to raise revenue, and it is plainly designed to punish people who decline to buy insurance. “We cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not,” Scalia says. “We have never held—never—that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax. We have never held that any exaction imposed for violation of the law is an exercise of Congress’ taxing power—even when the statute calls it a tax, much less when (as here) the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty.” <<
It’s important to note that only ONE SINGLE SUPREME COURT JUDGE called Obamacare’s penalties a tax; the other four who decided Obamacare was legal did so with alternate legal reasoning.