The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board is pushing back on the possibility of Republicans keeping ObamaCare’s tax on investment income, an idea GOP leaders are considering to win more support for their healthcare legislation.

“When Republicans campaigned to ‘repeal and replace’ ObamaCare, we don’t recall hearing that they meant only some of its tax increases,” the Journal’s conservative-leaning editorial board wrote Sunday. “If they panic on the ObamaCare surtax, they’ll give Democrats a major policy victory without having provided a single vote to pass it. Talk about bad politics.”

ObamaCare imposes a 3.8 percent tax on net investment income — such as capital gains, dividends and interest — on individuals making more than $200,000 per year and married couples making more than $250,000 per year.

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The ObamaCare repeal bill that the House passed in May would repeal the tax retroactively to the start of 2017, and the draft bill the Senate unveiled last month would also retroactively repeal the tax.

But Democrats have assailed the Republicans’ legislation as a tax cut for the wealthy, and several GOP senators have recently expressed openness to keeping the net investment tax in order to bolster healthcare subsidies for low-income people.

The WSJ editorial board argued that if GOP senators don’t do away with the net investment tax in their healthcare bill, “Democrats will pocket the concession and continue demagoguing tax cuts for the wealthy as the tax debate begins — only more emboldened for having tasted blood.”

The editorial said that delaying the repeal of the tax until tax reform would make a rewrite of the tax code more difficult, since lawmakers would have to find a way to offset the $170 billion in revenue losses that repeal of the tax is estimated to produce.

The WSJ editorial board also said that a couple making $250,000 is “middle class” and that the reason to repeal the net investment tax is not to give wealthy taxpayers a tax break.

“The reason is to increase the stock of capital and improve the incentives for capital formation, which in turn increases labor productivity, wages and job creation,” the editorial said. The piece cited an estimate from the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation that repealing the tax would lead to an increase in 133,000 jobs over 10 years and would raise people’s after-tax incomes after accounting for economic growth.

“Combined with a successful tax reform, workers could see a big pay raise for the first time in years, which was President Trump’s foundational campaign promise,” the editorial board wrote.