Obama backing away from original social security payroll tax position

[Karmadillo]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/us/politics/16obama.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&adxnnlx=1218986063-r7bJHP3sA5AeUXu7o2b76A

Obama Camp Puts Forward More Modest Tax Changes

By LARRY ROHTER
Published: August 15, 2008

Senator Barack Obama appears to be altering his proposals for extending Social Security payroll taxes and raising the capital gains tax, by delaying the increases or scaling them back.

Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has not abandoned either his support for a higher tax rate on capital gains or his proposal to subject individual wages above $250,000 to the Social Security payroll tax. But recent statements by campaign aides suggested that the latest iterations of the plans are more modest.

On Thursday, for example, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Jason Furman, said that the Social Security payroll tax extension favored by Mr. Obama would only go into effect in a decade, after he had left office.

“This is a pretty standard way to do tax reforms in Social Security,” Mr. Furman said Friday in an interview.

In its original form, Mr. Obama’s plan was far more ambitious. “If we kept the payroll tax exactly the same but applied it to all earnings and not just the first $97,500, we could virtually eliminate the entire Social Security shortfall,” he wrote in an op-ed piece that appeared in the Quad City Times, an Iowa daily, in September 2007.

Members of Mr. Obama’s staff now say he was not making a specific commitment to a specific plan. He later modified the proposal by exempting from the payroll tax wages of $102,000 a year, the current ceiling for contributions, to $250,000, a concept that has been nicknamed the “doughnut hole” in that some income in the middle would not be taxed.

And though the original trial balloon seemed to endorse subjecting all income to the combined 12.4 percent tax that employees and employers now jointly pay, that too has been jettisoned. Instead, Mr. Obama now favors a combined rate of 2 percent to 4 percent on wages of those making more than $250,000.

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[babylonsister]

1. Nice twisting of the original title there.

"Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has not abandoned either his support for a higher tax rate on capital gains or his proposal to subject individual wages above $250,000 to the Social Security payroll tax."

[Karmadillo]

2. He's not backing away from his original proposal?

nt

[guruoo]

3. An "If" does not amount to a proposal. n/t

[Warren Stupidity]

4. Where is the timeline in the original proposal?

I don't see one, and yet that is the only thing purported to have changed. I realize that it is very unlikely that our Corporate Media would distort and mislead in order to support a GOP-directed narrative against one of the two major party candidates for president, but I would like to see tha actual original timeline that must have been changed in order to make this article anything other than a GOP campaign hit piece.

[Captain Hilts]

5. "Members of Mr. Obama’s staff now say he was not making a specific commitment to a specific plan."