Time For Straight Talk On Taxes
The Bear on Sep 19 2008 at 8:28 am | Filed under: Election 08’, Taxes
Politics: Democrats are tempting voters with the illusory free lunch of redistribution. Republicans can’t top them in that game, but they can — and should — call it the class warfare that it is.
On the subject of taxes, Americans face a clear choice in November. They can go with Barack Obama’s plan and start getting checks in the mail if they’re not among the “rich.” Or they can go with John McCain, let the wealthy keep their money and do without the checks.
You can see what the Republicans are up against. They state the truth when they say that Obama wants to raise taxes on income, business profits, dividends, capital gains and, yes, even death. But only a small slice of the population would bear this burden. Most of the public — not quite the 95% claimed by Obama, but a vast majority all the same — would come out ahead.
Call it blatant vote-buying if you will. The Democrats prefer to call it “fairness.” Obama is quite clear on the supposed morality of his plan. When Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly last week accused him of adopting the “socialist tenet” of income redistribution, Obama went folksy: “If I’m 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 more’?”
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby shot back one answer to that question, noting that tips are voluntary and taxes — as “confiscation at gunpoint” — are anything but. Obama was also being dishonest in implying that his tax relief plan is aimed mainly at the low-end of the income scale, where minimum-wage waitresses scrape by on scant tips at the local diner.
You can’t offer breaks to 95% of the public, or even 80% (as estimated in an analysis of the Obama plan by the Tax Policy Center), by targeting that fairly small group. You have to reach well into the middle-income ranks to produce such numbers. And so Obama does, with proposals such as tax-free status for seniors making up to $50,000 and a 10% mortgage interest credit for taxpayers who don’t itemize deductions.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
