We conservatives told you, over and over again, that it was coming. Liberals scoffed, pointing out that Obama promised that everyone except the rich would get a tax cut. Well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the One was lying through his teeth:
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said the president won’t rule out a health care reform bill that includes a middle-class tax hike.
“The president had said in the past that he doesn’t believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here. He still believes that,” Axelrod told me on This Week, “But there are a number of formulations and we’ll wait and see. The important thing at this point is to keep the process moving, to keep people at the table, to the keep the discussions going. We’ve gotten a long way down the road and we want to finish that journey.”
I pressed Axelrod on whether Obama will draw a line in the sand and veto any bill that funds health care reform with tax hikes for people making under $250,000 a year — despite a pledge Barack Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign not to raise taxes on the poor and middle-class.
“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches us. He is very cognizant of protecting people — middle class people, hard-working people who are trying to get along in a very difficult economy. And he will continue to represent them in these talks,” Axelrod said.
“But they’re also dealing with punishing health care costs, and that’s something that we have to deal with.”
We’re talking about Democrats, here. When they say they won’t rule something out, that means they’ve already decided in favor of it. When it comes to tax increases, they never met one they didn’t like. So you can bet that before the year is out, your taxes will be going up. And up. And up.
There’s no other way Obama is going to pay for all these pet projects of his. The Treasury is broke, especially after his massive spending spree. It’s rapidly getting to the point where we won’t be able to borrow any money, because our debt has gotten so high and creditors — like China — see us a risky investment.
Obama wants to have socialized health care (I don’t care what he calls it or how he dresses it up, that’s what he’s shooting for) and a host of other things paid for by the American taxpayer. We’re talking trillions of dollars in extra spending, and he’s going to sit there and tell us he won’t raise taxes? Spare us, please, Mr. President. Tax increases are his plan. They always have been and, as a liberal Democrat, they always will be. It’s in their DNA. They never think “Gee, maybe we should cut spending first.” Like a Pavlovian dog, their reflexive instinct is to raise taxes across the board, be it income taxes or other, less noticeable, ones (like cigarette taxes, energy taxes, alcohol taxes, etc.).
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