California Conservative

This post by James Pethokoukis should cause lots of alarm within the business community. Here’s what Mr. Pethokoukis wrote:

I have been arguing that Barack Obama’s tax hike plan represents a floor, not a ceiling. (And even that floor seems to fluctuate.) I recall that some House Democrats, like Charlie Rangel, were pushing a for a “millionaire” surtax during the last Congress.

Now this: My guy Dan Clifton, superanalyst at Strategas Research, has noticed that Speaker Pelosi is pushing for a permanent refundable tax credit on payroll taxes paid. Clifton thinks that tax credit could be paid for by a five percent surtax on higher income taxpayers. “While this achieves the same goal of raising the top tax rate, to achieve the permanent middle class tax cut, the 5 pct. surtax will fall on top of the higher income tax rates after the Bush tax cuts expire (39.6% + 5%).”

Raising taxes that much, especially early in his administration, would tell people that President-Elect Obama is an extremist. It would disintegrate his image as a centrist. Most importantly, it would deepen and lengthen the recession that we’re in.

On the other hand, this might just play into who he is. He might be arrogant enough to think that he can do this with impunity. He’d certainly get away with this with the kool-aid drinkers. I don’t think it’d fly with centrists and independents. In fact, it’s quite possible that it’d cause the scales to fall away from the centrists’ and independents’ eyes.

We’ll see how this plays out. This is what’s posted on the tax issues page on Obama’s campaign website:

Families making more than $250,000 will pay either the same or lower tax rates than they paid in the 1990s. Obama will ask the wealthiest 2% of families to give back a portion of the tax cuts they have received over the past eight years to ensure we are restoring fairness and returning to fiscal responsibility. But no family will pay higher tax rates than they would have paid in the 1990s. In fact, dividend rates would be 39 percent lower than what President Bush proposed in his 2001 tax cut.

It’s obvious that the pre-election plan doesn’t match up with the post-election plan, if indeed the 45% tax rate is what’s planned.

Earlier this morning, I told King that I never trusted Obama’s tax plan because I thought, like everything else, he was simply selling the American people a bill of goods he couldn’t possibly deliver on.

Technorati Tags: Taxes, Tax Increases, Barack Obama, Campaign Promises, Economy

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Economy, Obama, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.