Via Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy comes this new gem buried in the health care reform bill — the government will enhance its powers to apply penalties for even good-faith mistakes in tax returns:

Under current law, taxpayers who lose an argument with the IRS can generally avoid penalties by showing they tried in good faith to comply with the tax law. In a broad range of circumstances, the health-care bill would change the law to impose strict liability penalties for income-tax underpayments, meaning that taxpayers will no longer have the luxury of making an honest mistake. The ability of even the IRS to waive penalties in sympathetic cases would be sharply curtailed.

This provides some hint as to how Congressional Democrats plan to extract the funding to pay for their seemingly infinite list of expensive “cost-saving” programs. In short, they plan on making the tax code so complex that no one can possibly understand it (including the IRS itself), and then hit you with huge fines for your failure to understand it. Neat trick, huh? They don’t have to pay the political cost of hitting you with new taxes if they can just tax you for not perfectly understanding the jungle of taxes they have already applied.

But that’s ok. Since literally everyone who disagrees with them is by definition spineless, heartless, and/or brainless, you deserve it.