President Barack Obama has taken up Vice President Joe Biden's refrain that it's patriotic to want to pay higher taxes. Or, as the headline on one story put it, patriotic Americans want to share in the sacrifice and pay higher taxes. He also said at his press conference that 80% of the US population want to pay higher taxes.
This last, in particular, gets several reactions from me. One is questioning whether these people can really believe this, or are they just trying to con us. (Note that, in his press conference, Obama also said that tax cuts kill jobs!) A second is captured in this cartoon:
And third is noting that somewhere between 47% and 51% of our population (depending on your choice of source) pay no income taxes at all, so they figure they won't be the "someone else".
No, I do not believe Obama's 80% statement. And I'm not alone in this — neither does much of anyone else. In fact, this statement has now been identified as one of Obama's ten biggest lies.
All this comes as part of White House PR efforts associated with the debt ceiling negotiations, in which President Obama is still following his obsession to increase taxes on the country. (He doesn't say that, though — he insists on using the words "increase revenue" to try to make people think he's not out to increase taxes.) That obsession came back to the surface this week as he raised by 50% (an additional $400 billion on top of the $800 billion to be gained from tax reform)the amount of debt reduction he insisted come from increased revenues. That bait-and-switch is what made Speaker John Boehner walk away from the White House negotiations. (It's hard to try to negotiate with someone who, when you compromise, adds extra demands.)
Obama keeps talking about "shared sacrifice". When he uses the term, he means higher taxes. But I agree with the writer who noted that
Real “shared sacrifice” doesn’t involve seizing more funds from the small minority of the people who pay the vast majority of our taxes.
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