In an interview on February 9, 2010, President Obama says raising taxes on households earning less than $250,000 a year must be on the table of the deficit commission, but that he doesn't know if raising those taxes is a solution:
GOLDMAN: Well, if your deficit commission came back and said, as part of this overall recommendation, we would recommend raising taxes on households earning less than $250,000 a year, you would accept that as part of the overall?
OBAMA: I don’t want to prejudge the commission because the whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table and let’s see what folks can come up with.
GOLDMAN: So, even raising taxes?
OBAMA: What I can’t do is to set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table because, at that point, there are going to be - some who say, we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some who say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon, you just can’t solve the problem.
So, what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions. I want everybody to sit down and work off of a common base of facts.
Just eight days prior, however, he submitted a $3.8 trillion budget which was anything but agnostic about the need for tax increases on such households.
The new agnostic tone on taxes is interesting because of the dust-up over a news report, later pulled, that Obama would let the Bush tax cuts expire, which would mean huge tax increases on every American, including whopping increases of 50% on the poorest of taxpayers by letting the 10% bracket expire and shoving them into the 15% bracket.
The White House quickly jumped on that news report, and emphasized that the new budget calls for making the Bush tax cuts permanent for those making under $250,000.
What the article does not mention is that Obama's budget extends all of the Bush tax cuts for single returns making less than $200,000 and married returns making less than $250,000. Whatever you think of Obama's proposed budget and tax policies, this omission in an article entitled "Backdoor taxes to hit middle class" is either evidence of intentional deceit or terrible reporting.
So on February 1 Obama is intellectually certain not only that tax increases on the below $250K crowd are not needed in the current budget, but aren't going to be needed period and the Bush tax cuts should be made permanent. But nine days later he's a doubting Thomas? What happened in the interim?
Ganja, that's what.
