President Obama repeatedly pledged that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $200,000 a year. You could say he was downright evangelical about it.
Now, he’s agnostic:
“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” Obama said. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”
Accepting the second definition of agnostic – a person unwilling to commit to an opinion about something – this could present a political challenge for the White House if the fiscal commission that it creates proposes broad-based tax increases.
Obama committed during his campaign for president to avert tax increases for households making less than $250,000 a year – and he is seeking a repeal of the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts on households making more than $250,000 a year in the $3.8 trillion budget for 2011 that he has proposed to Congress.
The commission cannot be restricted in its reach, the president maintains. He promised to establish this commission in his State of the Union address after efforts to create a bipartisan budget commission failed in the Senate.
Is there a spot on the table for the Fair Tax? How about lowering the capital gains tax?
Probably not. I’ll wagering most of the table space is occupied by a VAT tax.
That, along with allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, will lead to a worse economy, not a stronger one.
You can’t take more and more from the private sector and expect them to grow. That’s not how it works.
If there were more people in Obama’s brain trust with private sector experience, they might figure that out.
