Barack Obama must have an interesting definition to the word “fair”:
"We shouldn't be distorting our tax code to benefit a few powerful interests," Obama said in remarks to several dozen tax experts at the Tax Policy Center, a research center in Washington run by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. "We should be insisting that everyone pays their fair share, and when I'm president, they will."
Or perhaps he has a very wide definition of what constitutes the middle class. At least that is what I am led to believe when I compare his remarks on tax policy with a bit of empirical data:
"We shouldn't be distorting our tax code to benefit a few powerful interests," Obama said in remarks to several dozen tax experts at the Tax Policy Center, a research center in Washington run by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. "We should be insisting that everyone pays their fair share, and when I'm president, they will."
Or perhaps he has a very wide definition of what constitutes the middle class. At least that is what I am led to believe when I compare his remarks on tax policy with a bit of empirical data:
If you can read, you can see the contradiction for yourself. If the top ten percent of Americans earn forty-two percent of income while paying sixty-six percent of Federal Income Taxes, I would tend to characterize that as paying “their fair share”.
There are those people in this world who honestly feel that it is the government’s job to play Robin Hood. There is a perfectly rational argument to be made for taxes as a means of redistributing income. It is not an argument I agree with, but nonetheless it does pass the minimum standards to actually be considered an argument. What Obama is saying, however, does not even make it over that bar. He is obfuscating plain facts and pandering to class anxiety; in short, he is doing what politicians have done since time immemorial. So much for an end to “Small Politics”.
There are those people in this world who honestly feel that it is the government’s job to play Robin Hood. There is a perfectly rational argument to be made for taxes as a means of redistributing income. It is not an argument I agree with, but nonetheless it does pass the minimum standards to actually be considered an argument. What Obama is saying, however, does not even make it over that bar. He is obfuscating plain facts and pandering to class anxiety; in short, he is doing what politicians have done since time immemorial. So much for an end to “Small Politics”.
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