Obama To Break Pledge Of Not Increasing Taxes On Incomes Of Less Than $250,000/yr

Well, it's good to be back among the ranks of the employed. Now that I have an income again, I can devote just a little more time to helping the world stay informed about key issues we are facing.

Many of us knew that Barack Obama had absolutely no intention of keeping many of his campaign promises. Instead of allowing the health care debate to be made public over C-SPAN, he and his Democrat followers instead chose to hold their own meetings behind closed doors and completely shut out the Republicans. He promised that he would veto any bill that contained earmarks but instead has signed legislation that overall contains over 9,000 earmarks.

So, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that Obama is now poised to break a campaign promise he made on September 8, 2008:

“And I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase—not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

It is becoming clear that Obama made this grandiose claim in an effort to get votes by painting himself as some sort of anti-tax candidate. Well, now that he got the votes, he's singing a completely different tune:

According to Terrence Jeffrey at Cybercast News Service:

[T]he new health care plan released in summary form yesterday by the White House specifically calls for increasing the Medicare payroll tax on “households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.” Unless President Obama is prepared to say that the only type of “family” that qualifies as a “family” under his tax pledge is one that is formed around a "married couple filing jointly" than his new health care proposal violates his 2008 tax pledge on its face. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, makes clear that the “head of household” tax filing status is for “unmarried” taxpayers. A definition of the term “head of household” on the IRS Web site says: “Generally, you may claim head of household filing status on your tax return only if you are unmarried and pay more than 50% of the costs of keeping up a home for yourself and your dependent(s) or other qualifying individuals.”

That seems to be the mantra of the Democrats: Tax anything that can be taxed in order to pay for the irresponsible spending the Democrats have engaged in over the past year.

It's true that Republicans went on a spending binge when they were in power, but the Democrats have far outstripped anything that Republicans have done since 1994. The republicans were bad, but the Democrats are infinitely worse.

More:

The White House posted the president’s tax increase proposal as part of the summary of the new health-care reform bill he is proposing. “Under current law, workers who earn a salary pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,” says the summary of Title IX of the president’s proposal. “The Act will include an additional 0.9 percentage point Hospital Insurance tax for households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. In addition, it would add a 2.9 percent tax for such high-income households to unearned income including interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents (excluding income from active participation in S corporations).”

There it is. Clear and concise. Obama had no intention of keeping his "no tax increases" on anyone under $250,000/yr pledge.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Breaking His Pledge? Obama Calls For Increasing Payroll Taxes On ‘Households’ Earning Less Than $250,000 Per Year
Terrence Jeffrey
Cybercast News Service
February 23, 2010

Reality Check From CBS: Obama's Infomercial Didn't Discuss The True Cost Of His Presidency

First the Associated Press and now CBS is finding fault with Obama's claims from last night's 30-minute ad. In a nutshell, Wyatt Andrews shows us that it will not be possible for Obama to keep his campaign promises (just like Bill Clinton was unable to keep his) when it came to budgets, new spending and taxes.

From the article:

Let's start with his highly suspect, and widely discredited, claim that he can find federal "spending cuts beyond the costs" of his promises. Very few independent economists believe he has identified the savings needed to offset his remarkable list of tax credits, tax cuts and spending pledges. Fact: Even if you believe Obama intends to fix health care, most independent analysts say the cost is massive - $1.2 trillion over ten years, according to the highly respected Lewin Group. When the new Congress wakes up next year to a $1 trillion deficit, and answers the overwhelming new demands for another stimulus package, will the leadership really bite on a health care reform package that digs the deficit hole so much deeper?

And this:

Fact: The tax cuts he promises, which are mostly refundable tax credits (code for cash back), will cost $60 billion just in year one, according the National Taxpayers Union, though the Obama campaign's own estimates in July put that figure at $130 billion.

But what a great time to be a worker who owes no taxes! You get a check for not paying taxes at all! Wealth redistribution, here we come!

And this:

Fact: His new promise to give businesses a $3,000 tax credit for each new job created will cost $40 billion. But economists say this credit is far more likely to benefit companies already planning to expand and will likely not be enough to help companies create new jobs or forestall layoffs.

Yep. That wealth redistribution check isn't going to mean much to the workers who will lose their jobs because their employers are getting over-taxed.

Fact: Obama's claim he will lower health care premiums by $2,500 is: 1.) guesswork, which is 2.) based on health care savings that might, in a perfect world, happen over 10 years - a fact Obama neatly glosses over.

And we already know what happened in Canada and Great Britain with their versions of socialized medicine.

Most of the time he spends the Iraq savings in the context of the roads he wants to build; sometimes it's for the teachers he wants to hire. Tonight, he riffed rhetorically on the savings, asking how many scholarships could be funded, or how many schools could be built. In the end though, presuming he really saves $90 billion, he can only spend it once. Remember he also mentioned rebuilding the military ($7 billion/yr); his education initiative ($18 billion/yr); and his energy initiative ($15 billion/yr). He did not mention the $188 billion that he would spend on the brand new stimulus package he has proposed. If he closes every loophole as promised, saves every dime from Iraq, raises taxes on the rich and trims the federal budget as he's promised to do "line by line," he still doesn't pay for his list. If he's elected, the first fact hitting his desk will be the figure projecting how much less of a budget he has to work with - thanks to the recession. He gave us a very compelling vision with his ad buy tonight. What he did not give us was any hint of the cold reality he's facing or a sense of how he might prioritize his promises if voters trust him with the White House.

Awesome article!

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Reality Check: The Cost Of Obama's Pledges
Wyatt Andrews
CBS News
October 29, 2008

Barack Obama's Plan To Force Socialism On The United States, Even Though We Don't Want It

84%. That's how many Americans think that the Marxist philosophy of "redistributing the wealth" is wrong. Thus, even if Barack Obama wins next week, he will run into a wall of opposition from the American people. So, what will he do about it?

Simple. He will stack the courts.

Steven G. Calabresi over at the Wall Street Journal has penned a great column and shows us exactly how Obama plans to do it. With a possible four Supreme Court appointments, Obama would certainly appoint socialists and other extreme leftists to the High Court. That will be majorly bad news for America since it would mean a permanent socialist government from which we may never escape and any attempts to remove such a government could be struck down by Obama's socialist judges. (I can say this with a straight face because Europe, despite the troubles they have faced, have never been able to get rid of the socialism that they are shackled under for the same reason.)

From Mr. Calabresi's column:

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

And here we are, back to redistribution of the wealth, an idea that only brought disaster to the economies of any nation that has ever tried it.

And it wasn't just his comment to Joe the Plumber. Obama had designs on socialist intervention long before that:

In a Sept. 6, 2001, interview with Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM, Mr. Obama noted that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," and "to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical." He also noted that the Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government -- and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

The prospect of a socialist presidency should scare everybody. In his misguided attempts to bring about "social economics" to the poor, Obama is going to hurt them even more. By taking money away from those who pay the wages, those who work for the wages will be hurt. He may be giving away $1000 checks to those wage earners in exchange for their vote, but that won't make up for the jobs that wage earners will lose under a cruching tax increase.

And for those of you who don't believe that history can repeat itself:

A whole generation of Americans has come of age since the nation experienced the bad judicial appointments and foolish economic and regulatory policy of the Johnson and Carter administrations. If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

It happened under Carter, and will be even worse under Obama.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Obama's 'Redistribution' Constitution
Steven G. Calabresi
The Wall Street Journal
October 28, 2008