Taxation

Obama’s Socialist Tax, In His Own Words

Obama’s mouth keeps on giving. Unfortunately, his mouth is writing check his butt can’t cash. The Tickler appeals to all readers, use your brain and show up to vote. We can’t let this guy get into office.

Plumber: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it.”

Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind ya, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” Obama the crooked imbecile on the stump (see the video here)

From the desk of the Tickler’s wife…

Here are some key takeaways from the WSJ piece on the true nature of Obama’s tax “cuts”:

Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

The total annual expenditures on refundable “tax credits” would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as “tax credits,” the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.

Read the article here

Clinton Promised Middle Class Tax Cuts Too…

Yet another piece in the Wall Street Journal worth a read…

Clinton’s campaign before his first term was full of promises similar to Obama’s rhetoric.

“Now, I’ll tell you this,” [Clinton] said. “I will not raise taxes on the middle class to pay for these programs. If the money does not come in there to pay for these programs, we will cut other government spending, or we will slow down the phase-in of the programs.”

Mr. Clinton, of course, won that election. And as the inauguration approached, he began backtracking from his promise. At a Jan. 14, 1993, press conference in New Hampshire, he claimed that it was the media that had played up a middle-class tax cut, not him. A month later, he announced his actual plan before a joint session of Congress.

On page one of the New York Times, the paper described the fate of the middle-class tax cut this way: “Families earning as little as $20,000 a year — members of the ‘forgotten middle class’ whose taxes he promised during his campaign to cut — will also be asked to send more dollars to Washington under the President’s plan.”

In some ways, we are today reliving the campaign of 1992. As in 1992, the Democrat is promising a middle-class tax cut. As in 1992, the Democrat is hammering the Republican as a tool of the rich…

and…

Barring divine intervention, a President Obama would not have a Republican Congress to worry about. Instead, he would be working with a Democratic speaker of the House who loaded billions in pork onto a bill meant to fund our troops; with a Democratic Senate majority leader who promised to change the way Congress spent but fought earmark reform; and with committee leaders such as Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, who did so much to bring us the financial implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Read the complete article here

Tax Plan: Obama Wants Women Out of The Workplace

In an Op-Ed Piece in the WSJ Obama’s two economic advisers, Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee outline the domestic terrorism that is the standard Democrat taxation strategy. To bring the propaganda from the O-blivious campaign the New York Sun editors adds the commentary

Mr. Obama’s two economic advisers, Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, have an op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, and it isn’t pretty. To begin with, they propose bringing back the 39.6% top income tax bracket, an increase from the 35% current top rate. On top of that, he’d impose a new payroll tax on those top earners of 2% to 4%, bringing their marginal tax rate to as high as 43.6%. Add to that the top New York City income tax rate of 3.648% and the top New York State income tax rate of 6.85%, and the nominal marginal income tax rate mounts to a staggering 54%. Because Mr. Obama proposes to put the capital gains and dividend tax rate at 20% even for the “rich” — a mere 33% increase over the current 15% rate — expect to see plenty of high earners scurrying to find creative ways of structuring their income as capital gains or dividends rather than as earned income.

Meanwhile, the most astonishing sentence in the op-ed is this one: “His plan would not raise any taxes on couples making less than $250,000 a year, nor on any single person with income under $200,000.” It amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions. If those two single persons with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children. Mr. Obama may be able to get away with symbolic slights to women, such as not picking Senator Clinton as vice president. But punishing them with confiscatory taxes for participating in the workforce at a high income level moves the slight into the realm of substance.