Yesterday, our friend Bookworm wondered if Obama was conceding that raising taxes hurts the economy when he appeared on ABC’s Sunday show, This Week.
“Even if we’re still in a recession, I’m going to go through with my tax cuts,” Obama said. “That’s my priority.”
What about increasing taxes on the wealthy?
“I think we’ve got to take a look and see where the economy is. I mean, the economy is weak right now,” Obama said on “This Week” on ABC. “The news with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I think, along with the unemployment numbers, indicates that we’re fragile.”
How magnanimous. The economy is hurting, yet he is still going to let you keep more of the government’s money. That first sentence probably belies any economic/tax/revenue/Laffer epiphany by Obama.
But its that first sentence above is what caught my eye: “I’m going to go through with my tax cuts.”
Come again? What cuts would those be? Forgive, but I don’t dedicate both eyes to politics. Pakistan if falling apart, al-Qaeda’s insurgency there is morphing from slow-motion to a dead sprint, and Iran is beginning to bypass Syria in its dealings with Hizballah. More than one eye is clearly watching events far more important that parsing The One.
So I will ask the Wizbang readers to pool resources and find out exactly what taxes – specifically – he has proposed cutting. Not rhetorically, but specifically. Because it sure is news to me.
Here is what I suspect. The taxes Obama would cut may well be for those at the bottom end of the tax generating spectrum. As someone who has actually been there as a single parent, when Earned Income Credit is taken into account, these families are not net tax payers, but net tax consumers, receiving more in refunds with EIC than paid into the system.
Now, this is not a bad thing, per se. I can tell you that it is helpful when hurting. But at the same time, we are talking about net tax consumers here. Cutting taxes here would not be a tax cut inasmuch as it would be an increase in disbursements of tax revenues from other sources. And as such, can we really call this – if in fact this is his intended ‘cuts’ – a tax cut?
So, readers, where are his specific proposals for a cut in taxes?
