The Wall Street Journal is providing a useful translation service for the grand theft scheme, aka “The Obama Tax Plan.”
Here are two recent articles to clarify exactly what Barry really means when he says he wants to make taxes “fair”.
Here’s the first article, along with a few excerpts. Here’s the entire column for your reading dis? pleasure.
On Saturday night at the Saddleback Church in Southern California, Rick Warren showed Jim, Gwen, Tom, Bob and Co. what a presidential moderator can accomplish when he makes the debate about the candidates and not himself.
Over the course of a two-hour, televised forum, the best-selling evangelical author and pastor took a novel approach to our presidential debates. He asked Barack Obama and John McCain the same simple questions — and then gave them time to answer.
For example, here is how Mr. Warren asked the candidates to talk about their flip-flops: “Give me a good example of something, 10 years ago, you said that’s the way I feel about [it] and now, 10 years later, I changed my position.”
Likewise on abortion: “I know this is a very complex issue. Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?” And again on the Supreme Court: “Which existing Supreme Court Justice would you not have nominated?”
These are not your standard-issue Beltway questions, and their directness made them hard to evade. Nowhere was this more evident than in Mr. Warren’s attempt to get the candidates — both of whom are trying to persuade the American people they are tax cutters — to draw some fundamental distinctions between their approaches. In simple but arresting language, he cut to the chase.
Here’s how he put it: “OK. Taxes. Define rich. I mean give me a number. Is it $50,000, $100,000, $200,000? Everybody keeps talking about who we’re going to tax. How can you define that?”
Plainly this is a man who understands that it is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get a direct answer from a politician running for election. And indeed, while Mr. McCain was at first shy about giving a specific number, in the end he did allow that someone who had an income of, say, $5 million could pretty definitely be said to be rich.
Yesterday’s Politico hooted that with this response Mr. McCain handed his opponent the perfect fodder for a TV commercial. That, of course, overlooks those who might actually find attractive Mr. McCain’s fuller explanation. “I don’t want to take any money from the rich,” he said, “I want everybody to get rich.”
Mr. Obama, by contrast, started out much more directly, suggesting that if you make $150,000 or less you may be poor or middle class. A family with an income above $250,000, he went on to say, is “doing well.” And if you find yourself in that category, he’s going to target you for a tax hike — all in the name of creating “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code.”
In fact, the idea of fairness is at the heart of his whole economic argument. And he goes back to it in almost every public appearance.
He talks about it as a general theme: “It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”
He invokes it as a solution for Social Security: “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.”
He points to how it guides his energy policy: “The first part of my plan is to tax the windfall profits of oil companies and use some of that money to help you pay the rising price of gas.”
And he stuck to it on capital gains, even after ABC’s Charlie Gibson noted that the record shows increased taxes on capital gains — which would affect 100 million Americans — would likely lead to a decrease in government revenues: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”
Translated into ordinary English, what that means is that it doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.
Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.
Mr. Warren, a man of the cloth, has done us a great service by asking the candidates to answer a pretty secular question: What kind of income makes an American “rich”? Maybe in the more secular setting of an upcoming debate, one of our nonpastor moderators could ask the candidates the moral question: What specific rate of individual taxation would it take for the rich to be paying their fair share?
Next, we get another useful translation from today’s edition which tells it like it really is. Entitled “Obama’s Plan is Really a Welfare Plan”, it gets to the heart of the matter, or as one of the comments noted, “If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you’ll have a lot of friends named Paul.”
Barack Obama’s tax plan is the opposite of supply-side economics. He proposes to raise marginal rates for just about every federal tax. He also proposes a raft of tax credits that taxpayers can receive if they engage in various government-specified activities.
Moreover, the tax credits would mostly go to those who pay little or nothing in federal income taxes. His trick is to make the tax credits “refundable.” Thus, if the tax credit is for $1,000, but the taxpayer would otherwise only pay $200 in taxes, the government would write a check to the taxpayer for $800. If the taxpayer pays nothing in federal income taxes, the government would pay him the whole $1,000.
Such credits are not tax cuts. Indeed, they should be called The New Tax Welfare. In effect, Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand a slew of government spending programs that are disguised as tax credits. The spending on these programs is then subtracted from the total tax burden, in order to make the claim that his tax plan is a net tax cut overall.
On the tax side of the ledger, the details released by his campaign last week confirm what a President Obama has in mind for our most productive citizens. The top individual income tax rate, for example, would be increased by 13%, to 39.6%; the next-highest rate would be raised to 36%. The top rates on capital gains and dividends would rise by a third, to 20%
The Social Security payroll tax would be raised between 16% to 32% for families making over $250,000 a year. This means that the real returns these people get from their lifetime payments into the retirement program will be driven below 0%, according to my own previous research, which was published by the Cato Institute and elsewhere.
Mr. Obama also wants a permanent federal estate tax, with a top rate of 45%; his health-insurance plan includes a new payroll tax on employers; and he also contemplates several increases in the corporate income tax, including a new so-called windfall profits tax on oil companies.
Then there is the spending side of the ledger. Mr. Obama proposes a fully refundable Making Work Pay Tax Credit, which would have the government pay out $500 to each worker and $1,000 to couples — reminiscent of George McGovern’s 1972 election proposal for the government to send a $1,000 check to everyone.
His American Opportunity Tax Credit would provide a $4,000, fully refundable tax credit for college tuition expenses. His Mortgage Interest Tax Credit would provide a 10% credit — refundable — to offset mortgage interest payments for lower- and middle-income families. His Health Care Tax Credits, which the campaign says “will ensure that health insurance is available and affordable for all families,” include “a new refundable 50 percent health tax credit on employee premiums paid by employers.”
Currently existing tax credits would also become spending programs in the Obama tax program. The Savers Credit would be made fully refundable, and would be expanded, according to the campaign, “to match 50% of the first $1,000 of savings for families that earn under $75,000.” The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit would be made refundable and expanded to allow “low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit on the first $6,000 of child care expenses.”
The Earned Income Tax Credit is already refundable. Mr. Obama would expand it to “increase the number of working parents eligible for EITC benefits, increase the benefits available to noncustodial parents who fulfill their child support obligations, increase benefits for families with three or more children, and reduce the EITC marriage penalty, which hurts low-income families.” In short, welfare spending is to be increased by paying more money out to low-income income tax filers.
The latest Congressional Budget Office data shows the bottom 40% of income earners already pays no income taxes. Indeed, they receive a net payment from the federal income tax system — meaning from the taxpayers — equal to 3.8% of all federal income taxes, because of the refundable tax credits under current law. The middle 20% of income earners, the true middle class, pays 4.4% of federal income taxes.
Overall, the bottom 60% of income earners pay less than 1% of federal income taxes on net. When “tax credits” primarily go to this group in the form of checks from the government (rather than a reduction in their tax burden) it is simply an abuse of the language to call the spending a tax cut.
Consequently, to say, as the campaign does say, that the candidate’s tax plan is a tax cut on net — and that it would limit taxes to 18.2% of GDP — is grossly misleading. The Obama tax plan would sharply increase real taxes. It also would come nowhere near to paying for the massive increases in federal spending he has proposed, including the spending that is disguised in the form of refundable tax credits.
Now, I don’t care how you feel about Little Barry, the above is just a disaster for the country. As I’ve asked before, and not ONE liberal has ever answered, “Can you name one nation or civilization that has taxed its way to prosperity?”
