You know the reason I keep harping on what the president says is because what criticism he does get is in the form of “he didn’t do enough” of whatever bad idea he shouldn’t have done in the first place. In yesterdays free political advertising Twitter Town Hall he said some things that we all expected. He said some other things that were not expected, as well. One thing in particular caught my attention in a very, very bad way.
If I had a pack of cigarettes or a whiskey bottle I would’ve thrown it at the screen when I heard his response to a rather innocuous question. I skipped ahead so you don’t have to watch the entire hour-long smugfest conversation.
Here’s the transcript:
MR. DORSEY: So all of our questions now are coming in real time — this one less than 10 minutes ago, and surfaced from a curator: “So will you raise taxes on the middle class at least to President George W. Bush levels?”
THE PRESIDENT: No, what we’ve said is let’s make permanent the Bush tax cuts for low and moderate income folks — people in — for the 98 percent1 of people who, frankly, have not seen their wages go up or their incomes go up over the last decade. They don’t have a lot of room; they’re already struggling to meet the rising cost of health care and education and gas prices and food prices.
If all we do is just go back to the pre-Bush tax cut rates for the top income brackets, for millionaires and billionaires2, that would raise hundreds of billions of dollars. And if you combine it with the cuts we’ve already proposed, we could solve our deficit and our debt problems.
This is not something that requires radical solutions. It requires some smart, common-sense, balanced approaches. I think that’s what the American people are looking for and that’s what I’ve proposed. And that’s what I’m going to keep on trying to bring the parties together to agree to, is a balanced approach that has more cuts than revenue, but has some revenue, and that revenue should come from the people who can most afford it3.
I hope you caught that. And the transcript doesn’t do justice to how difficult it was for him to not say that he was going to tax the middle class. The president coined a new term in the Twitter Town Hall Wednesday, “the moderate class.” While he doesn’t use those exact words, the implication is clear: the people who don’t make enough for us to bilk on the front end.
My emphasized points:
1. Moderate income folks? Don’t you mean the under-$249,999.99 per year making folks? Or will that number change? Is it going to be under $200,000? Under $100,000?
Because, the implication is clear, that only the people who the government can’t seize enough “revenue” (I’ll get to that in a minute) are safe from [directly] raised taxes.
And can somebody give me a small business owner that makes under $100,000 a year that hires a lot of people? The Obama administration works hard to make sure that no good deed goes unpunished.
2. Millionaires and billionaires? Eat them. Still won’t settle the problem.
Attention diverted to the ultra-rich, the almost-sorta-kinda rich are the ones the government gets its “revenue” from.
3. Taxes. Not revenue. Taxes. Tax money.
The idea that the federal government is a money-making organization was just about the most maddening thing in this free political advertising economic forum. And he still–still–won’t get off-message about how the responsible thing to do is steal money from “the rich”.
