Suppose you’re a family of four at or near the federal poverty level. Under current law, if you earn an additional dollar, you get to keep around 60–70 cents.

Under the House and Senate health care bills, however, you would get to keep maybe 38 cents. Or 26 cents. Or maybe just 18 cents.

The following graph (from my recent study, “Obama’s Prescription for Low-Wage Workers: High Implicit Taxes, Higher Premiums”) shows that under the House and Senate bills, the combination of (1) a mandate tax and (2) subsidies that disappear as income rises would impose implicit tax rates on poor families that reach as high as 82 percent over broad ranges of income.

This graph actually smooths out some rather bumpy implicit tax rates that spike as high as 174 percent.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the public saw that too-generous government subsidies can actually trap people in a cycle of poverty and dependence. President Obama and his congressional allies seem not to have learned that lesson.