Reuters reports today, “After months of effort, President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans are right back where they started as they try to avert a looming debt default: arguing over taxes. . . . Democrats say new tax revenues need to be part of the equation, while Republicans say they won’t back any increase in taxes. . . . ‘It’s baffling that the President and his party continue to insist on massive tax hikes in the middle of a jobs crisis,’ said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. . . . Obama wanted between $1.3 trillion and $1.7 trillion of that total to come from new tax revenue, according to a Republican source.”
So now Democrats are demanding over $1 trillion in new taxes after spending a week saying they wanted $400 billion in tax increases. Of course, as the AP points out today, Democrats want to increase taxes, but they’re going out of their way not to say that: “Call it eliminating an unfair break, or removing an unjust loophole, or even ‘taking a balanced approach.’ Just don’t call it raising taxes. As they work toward a must-do deal with Republicans on paring trillions from the deficit in order to raise the nation’s debt limit, President Barack Obama and Democrats are saying almost anything to avoid the politically toxic pronouncement that they want to increase taxes. . . . Proposals under consideration include raising taxes on small business owners and potentially low- and middle-income families. You won’t hear about that from Obama. Instead the president focuses on the very rich, and speaks euphemistically.”
Despite this, not long ago, President Obama himself seemed to understand that raising taxes in a struggling economy is a bad idea. The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes reminds today, “In August 2009, on a visit to Elkhart, Indiana to tout his stimulus plan, Obama sat down for an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, and was conveyed a simple request from Elkhart resident Scott Ferguson: ‘Explain how raising taxes on anyone during a deep recession is going to help with the economy.’ Obama agreed with Ferguson’s premise – raising taxes in a recession is a bad idea. ‘First of all, he’s right. Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes. So I guess what I’d say to Scott is – his economics are right. You don’t raise taxes in a recession. We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.’” In fact, Obama said, “The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up — take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.” And when Obama signed an extension of the Bush tax cuts last December, thus preventing a massive tax increase he said that low taxes help “millions of entrepreneurs… hire new workers.”
As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on Fox News Sunday this week, “[W]e believe the President was right in December when he signed the two-year extension of the current tax rates, that raising taxes in the middle of the economic situation we’re in is a terrible idea. All the arguments the president used in December still work today. . . . We think [raising taxes is] a terrible idea. It’s a job-killer. . . . [H]ow do you get the economy growing, which is the biggest way to increase government revenue? You do not get the economy growing by having a big tax increase. You get the economy growing by incentivizing the private sector.”
#Senate News Briefing
Article written by: Tom White
About Tom White
Tom is a US Navy Veteran, owns an Insurance Agency and is currently an IT Manager for a Virginia Distributor. He has been published in American Thinker, currently writes for the Richmond Examiner as well as Virginia Right! Blog. Tom lives in Hanover County, Va and is involved in politics at every level and is a Recovering Republican who has finally had enough of the War on Conservatives in progress with the Leadership of the GOP on a National Level.
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