Remember when President Obama was faced with the dilemma of allowing all of the Bush era tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010? Obama wanted to allow the cuts on those making more than 200k to expire but the cuts on those making less to continue; however Republicans felt that raising taxes on anyone in the midst of an economic tsunami was unwise. In the end Mr. Obama relented and extended the cuts for 2 years.
Despite Obama extending all the Bush cuts for 2 years, he’s complained about it non-stop and has tried to reinstate the taxes on those making more than 200k ever since. His latest endeavor is to use taxes on what he calls “the rich” as a means to fund his latest stimulus folly.
Today in the Rose Garden Obama released his plan to pay for his stimulus 3.0. Obama wants to go back on his promise to extend the cuts for 2 years and immediately restore the taxes and add a whole new category of taxes on those making more than a million. Obama’s new millionaire’s tax repeats the past mistakes employed by Democrats, specifically the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT.) Obama’s plan calls for a minimum tax on anyone making more than a million a year, but he fails to understand the basic rule of taxes: the more you tax something the less of it you get; in the case of job-creators you can figure out what that means.
Even though a majority of Americans favor a more fair tax system, the Democrats send a false message based on mega-billionaires like Warren Buffett. Buffett who earns most of his income in the form of dividends from investments is not a common example. Buffett made headlines when he complained that he paid less taxes than many in his company, however, as detailed in an earlier article, Buffett’s assertion fails to take into consideration those who make much less who plow much of their income back into their businesses creating jobs.
The president is promising debt cuts that when combined with the spending cuts enacted last month would total more than $3 trillion. If all this sounds eerily familiar it’s because we’ve heard this all before. President’s routinely promise spending cuts in conjunction with tax increases. The tax increases happen, the cuts never do. Adding to the phony cuts are savings assumed to be gained through the winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a purely “counting your chickens before they’re hatched” scheme.
Taking a confrontational approach, today in the Rose Garden Obama vowed he’d veto any package that cuts into Medicare without raising "serious revenues" from wealthy Americans and corporations, challenging Republicans to go through with their no-tax-hike pledge. "We can’t just cut our way out of this hole. It’s going to take a balanced approach. It’s only right that we ask everyone to pay their fair share." Note to President Obama: not only doesn’t everyone pay their fair share, 51 percent of the population pays nothing. Mr. Obama doesn’t want the “rich” to pay their fair share because clearly they already do, he wants the rich to pay all the taxes.
"Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership," Boehner said Monday. "The Joint Select Committee is engaged in serious work to tackle a serious problem: the debt crisis that is making it harder to get our economy growing and create more American jobs. Unfortunately, the president has not made a serious contribution to its work today. This administration’s insistence on raising taxes on job creators and its reluctance to take the steps necessary to strengthen our entitlement programs are the reasons the president and I were not able to reach an agreement previously, and it is evident today that these barriers remain."
Obama’s proposal is pure politics that he knows has no chance of passing. His new taxes are nearly double the $800 billion that were discussed in July, but in the end could not pass Congress.
Obama’s plan includes $580 billion in cuts to mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion from Medicare and $72 billion from Medicaid and other health programs, but includes no changes in Social Security and no increase in the Medicare eligibility age, which the president had been willing to accept this summer. Without structural changes in Medicaid and Social Security absolutely nothing will have been accomplished.
Mr. Obama doesn’t want this plan to pass; he wants a re-election campaign issue plain and simple. Seeing that Congress is even less popular than he is, Obama is planning to run against a Congress that does nothing while the citizens suffer. What Mr. Obama doesn’t explain is how a significant number of Democrats oppose his plan as well. While Mr. Clinton may have been a brilliant political tactician, Obama is all about slight-of-hand. Distract the suffering public and perhaps he can convince them he’s worthy of a second term. We should know in about 14 months how well that works out.