Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
"I pledge to you that under my plan, no one making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not income tax, not capital gains taxes, not any kind of tax."
-- Presidential candidate Barack Obama in September 2008
Peter Roff, writing for U.S. News and World Report , figures Barack Obama blew that sweeping promise with just the cigarette tax hike.
But, Roff warns, that's just the start of middle-class tax increases.
The Congressional Budget Office says the president's "cap and trade" energy bill that narrowly passed the House recently will cost American households at least $175 a year.
And the president's top adviser, David Axelrod, admitted recently that Obama is open to the idea of taxing your health care benefits.
Interesting -- since this is what Obama said about the idea while facing Sen. John McCain in last year's election: "For the first time in American history, (McCain) wants to tax your health benefits. ... That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes. That's his idea of change."
In an editorial last week, The New Hampshire Union-Leader flat-out writes, "We've all been had."
"If you voted for Barack Obama for president because you believed his promise not to raise your taxes, you were had," the paper writes.
The cap-and-trade bill is undoubtedly the most worrisome tax increase the administration is pushing.
The Heritage Foundation estimates the $175-per-household cost may actually be closer to $2,000 a year for a family of four by 2020.
Then there are the questions over the larger economic impact of the bill. Emerging countries and polluters China and India, notes Charles Sherry at Examiner.com, would be wholly unrestrained in their CO2 emissions while America tries to compete with both hands tied behind its back.
"Having the U.S. shoulder an unfair burden as the country attempts to pull out of the worst recession in 70 years," Sherry writes, "while China, India and other emerging economies ignore greenhouse gases, gives American manufacturers another reason to export jobs to developing nations."
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office meekly admits in a footnote on the cap-and-trade legislation that its report "does not indicate the potential decrease in GDP that could result from the cap."
That's a pretty powerful footnote!
Thankfully, 44 Democrats in the House managed to have the gumption to vote against the cap-and-trade bill. Let's hope that gives opponents more intestinal fortitude in the Senate.
Perhaps this little nugget will too: There are serious doubts that this juggernaut of a bill -- a 1,300-page monstrosity that probably nobody read (though you may be comforted to know that Obama energy czar Carol Browner is proud of having read "major portions of it") -- may do little to help the environment.
We may never know for certain: An Environmental Protection Agency report questioning the validity of global warming has allegedly been suppressed by the Obama administration.
If we're going to tax ourselves to death when other countries aren't, possibly crippling an already weakened economy, shouldn't we at least be sure what we're doing is necessary?
