Need some help on Obama's pledge to lower taxes/

[pnorman]

""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." - 9/12/08, Dover, N.H."

Overall, I believe that it's been fulfilled, but some "Sin Taxes" had been raise --- eg: tobacco taxes in behalf of SCHIP. Can anyone in this DU community give me some hard specifics on how well he had fulfilled that pledge?

pnorman

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Jeeze! It's only been ten months!

Reagan took a couple of years to cut any taxes, IIRC.

I'm not sniping at you -- the Magic Pony Club started demanding results about a week after the inauguration.

It took about 40 years to monkeywrench the USA's financial and legal system. I won't be too upset if it takes BHO 4 years to start on the repairs.

--d!

[pnorman]

4. No, I don't take it as sniping.

But I'm responding to a crypto-teabagger, and need terse and irrefutable responses. My Googling of SCHIP yielded this useful scorecard: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/browse/?page=2

There's another useful NYT "scorecard" I had seen earlier on DU, that I'll search out later. But your comment on Reagan is something I'll also use.

pnorman

[Dogmudgeon]

6. My mistake ...

Actually, Reagan signed the Kemp-Roth tax cut package in August 1981; I was thinking it was later than that. I certainly didn't see an improvement in my income, being right out of college. However, it appears that it had little more than cosmetic effects -- it's biggest effect was the partial indexing of tax rates. You may want to emphasize the anemic real-world effect it had on non-rich taxpayers. Here is an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Recovery_Tax_Act_of_1981">overview on Wikipedia.

A terse example? "Reagan signed Kemp-Roth in 1981. It had about as much effect on working people as did the mass distribution of free cheese that the Gipper also authorized." (Ah, those days of my youth!)

Thanks for the site link. Be sure to check out the "Pants on Fire" page, too!

And good luck with the bagsman -- but I question the whole tax rationale to begin with. Why not tax the hell out of business? That way, they can pass them along in the form of higher prices, which they will then have to explain to the public without looking like whiners.

--d!

[pnorman]

7. Beloiw is the dialog after I had posted that Score Card on Obama:

Him: This week we celebrate a special birthday . Monica Lewinsky turns 44. Can you believe it. It seems like only yesterday she was crawling around the White House on her hands and knees, putting everything in her mouth.. They grow up so fast, don't they ."

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Me: "....putting everything in her mouth" <1230 'hits' by Google!>

Can you believe it? It took most of those Teabaggers over a week, before finally realizing what "teabagging" really meant! I still chuckle over that photo of one such clueless matron! Her hat was gaily festooned with teabags, and a few were dangling tantalizingly close to her gaping mouth!

But back to Adam Smith! "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." Clearly, Obama was basing his tax policy on principles laid down by Adam Smith! And there are many who believe that he had set the bar too high! $125,000/year would have been a juster cut-off figure! Time will tell.

PS: Now about that Adam Smith necktie............................

pnorman

[hfojvt]

2. it may depend on how much you smoke

"The increases, which raise the federal cigarette tax from 39 cents a pack to $1.01, applies to all tobacco products. It comes as more than two dozen states, desperate for revenue in a sunken economy, consider boosting their own tobacco taxes this year."

62 cents a pack in extra taxes. In order for there to be a tax increase, this needs to be offset against the Obama tax credit of $400. Until you buy more than 645.16 packs of cigarettes in a year, you are still ahead. That would be more than 1.7675 packs per day. Hopefully that is a very small percentage of the population.

[DeltaLitProf]

3. There's already been a payroll tax cut

But it's not very substantial. To me he put that cut-off too high. He should have said $125,000. Unless you live in Chicago, New York, Houston, Atlanta or Los Angeles, $250k a year is a very very good living.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. Those are all voluntary taxes.

If people don't want to pay them, they don't have to.

:shrug: