“Read my lips. No more taxes.” When former President George H.W. Bush reneged on his 1988 no-tax pledge two years later, it cost him a second term. Now, President Obama seems headed down the same dead end. During the 2008 campaign, he categorically promised not to raise taxes “one single dime” on the 95 percent of Americans making less than $250,000 per year. But, as his two top economic advisors acknowledged Sunday, there are too few rich people to pay for Obama’s trillion-dollar government-run health care plan, his already failed $787 billion economic stimulus program, and his quadrupling of the federal deficit. This makes the middle class the obvious next target for “sacrifice.”
Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the White House was not yet ready to rule out a middle-class tax hike. It’s a matter of when, not if, he added. Then Obama’s National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers likewise said when asked about the middle-class tax hike on “Meet the Press” that it was “never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what.”
That’s because Geithner and Summers both know that Obama’s health care proposal is not a stand-alone item. In addition to unfunded Social Security and Medicare entitlements, bailouts and stimulus spending have already pushed the national debt to $37,813 for every man, woman and child in America. According to the IRS, the top 5 percent – which includes households earning more than $160,041 – already pays 60 percent of all federal income taxes. Even former Clinton Treasury official Leonard Burman admitted in a New York Times oped that “this idea that everything new that government provides ought to be paid for by the top 5 percent, that’s a basically unstable way of governing.”
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs furiously backpedaled Monday, claiming Geithner and Summers were just talking in a “hypothetical back-and-forth” mode. Taxes and spending are an especially pressing issue now because federal tax receipts are down 18 percent, the biggest year-to-year decline in government revenue since 1932, and Obama’s spending ambitions exceed even FDR’s during World War II. As usual, the Democrats’ answer is to raise taxes, instead of cutting government spending, as American families everywhere are doing. Last fall, candidate Obama also said “the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.” Today, Obama’s own economic advisers know he won’t keep that promise, a fact Obama had to have known in 2008 because he knew then what he planned to spend. Either Obama is hopelessly bad at arithmetic – or he told a whopper.
