Via Jeff Jacoby:
……Looks like voters have started paying attention to Obama’s economics.
On Sept. 8, Fox News broadcast an interview between Obama and Bill O’Reilly that focused on taxation and the economy. Obama repeated his pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on the tiny fraction who earn more than $250,000.
“That’s class warfare,” O’Reilly objected. “You’re taking the wealthy in America, the big earners . . . you’re taking money away from them and you’re giving it to people who don’t. That’s called income redistribution. It’s a socialist tenet. Come on, you know that.”
“Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill,” Obama replied. “Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax.” He acknowledged that he doesn’t enjoy paying taxes either – “you think I like writing the check?” – but that “there are certain things we’ve got to do.” His tax proposal, he explained, was a matter of civility:
“If I am sitting pretty and you’ve got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me to say, I’m going to pay a little bit more? That’s neighborliness.” If that is Obama’s rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it’s no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude.
“Neighborliness.” Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoined the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn’t is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen Obama, “sitting pretty,” reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip.
Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference?
Apparently not, but he’s in good company. The democrats have always penalized Americans who do well financially, as if the majority of them didn’t get there by hard work and taking risks.
……Obama claims his proposal would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans, but well over 43 million tax returns, one-third of all those filed, already reflect an income tax liability of zero. In fact, Obama says, his plan would eliminate income taxes for an additional 10 million taxpayers. What he is really proposing, therefore, is not tax relief but a bald transfer of cash – $1,000 per family, he pledges – from the wealthiest Americans to everyone else.
……you don’t have to be rich to be skeptical when a candidate argues that the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who already pay 40 percent of federal income taxes, aren’t being taxed enough. Nor do you have to be an economist to wonder about the grasp of a nominee who tells 95 percent of the public that they can have something for nothing.
Across the board, we already pay for illegal aliens, welfare queens, wasteful earmarks, projects to nowhere, and an incalculable amount of lavish, arbitrary spending by the government.
Now, he wants to make taxpayers even more liable for non-tapayers.
You first, Obama.
Futureman,
95% of which voters? Newsflash: Tax cuts as well as increases affect everyone regardless of income. You really don’t think that the government will increase taxes on just the minority of wealthy in this country, who already pay the most proportionate taxes? Simply put, there are more middle class working people than there are wealthy (including the elected democrats).
Everyone deserves a tax cut. Including those in the upper brackets. They earned their money and certainly know best how to use it than the government.
If you don’t want a cut or if you don’t think that you’re being taxed enough, by all means, give more of your money to the IRS.
Just don’t expect the rest of us taxpayers to follow suit.
Retard.
SFC MAC
“no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude.”
Yeah cuz 95% of voters don’t want a tax cut. The last 8 years under Bush have demonstrated that tax cuts for the rich don’t work.
And this big tax increase that you are whining about (for the poor super rich) is simply allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.
And Obama has more econominc apptitude in his baby toe than that retard McCain and his tongue speaking nitwit VP.