Obama is to announce tonight not even inflation-adjusted George W. Bush-type tax relief to middle class families, as reported here, but just another gimmick:
"Among the highlights of President Obama’s State of the Union address plans to pull the American family out of economic plight is a $500 tax credit for two-earner families."
George W. Bush bookended his administration with similar gimmicks.
OK, the first one wasn't exactly a gimmick. The first was part of the then-temporary tax reduction passed by the Congress. You know the one. The check in the mail was a result of the implementation of the tax rate schedule which existed for the rest of Bush's presidency but was set to expire by the time of Obama. Obama finally agreed to make that schedule permanent, something George W. Bush wasn't able to make happen but Speaker John Boehner was. (Why is that? And how come no one except maybe two people on the planet recognize and applaud that? I am one of them. A Forbes columnist, Ralph Benko, is the other. But I digress.)
Flashback to the San Francisco Chronicle in June 2001, here, just six months after Bush assumed office after the narrowest presidential election victory in living memory:
Bush signed the $1.35 trillion tax cut -- which includes soon-to-be-mailed rebate checks of up to $600 -- amid the kind of presidential pomp he usually disdains: a formal ceremony in the East Room, with a Marine band playing "Hail to the Chief." ... In Congress yesterday, a few Republicans talked about making the current bill permanent. One of its odd features is that it expires on Dec. 31, 2010, a sunset provision put in because of congressional rules governing spending more than a decade into the future.
Bush's second and real gimmick came at the end of his presidency in 2008, just before all hell broke loose in the economy with massive bank failures, massive bankruptcies, massive foreclosures, massive job losses, and massive stock market declines. It was a minor echo of Herbert Hoover trying to stop the Great Depression, double, triple, and quadruple-downed on by his successor FDR but to no avail.
Market Watch had the story here in February 2008, detailing the very liberal character of the Republican stimulus plan, which at the time met with no criticism from candidate Obama (why? because it was Obama's brand of liberalism also):
President Bush signed a $168 billion economic stimulus package on Wednesday that will extend rebates to U.S. taxpayers, give tax breaks to businesses and make more-expensive mortgages available through the government and government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies. ... Bush said the U.S. economy has clearly slowed but that the package is "a booster shot for our economy." Approved by lawmakers last week, the package provides a tax rebate of up to $1,200 per working couple, plus $300 per child. ... Taxpayers will not have to apply for the rebate; it would come automatically based on their 2007 tax return. ... Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wove the stimulus package into a speech in Janesville, Wisc., on Wednesday, touting a plan he offered a few weeks ago. He proposed sending each working family a $500 tax cut and each senior a $250 supplement to their Social Security check. "Neither George Bush nor Hillary Clinton had that kind of immediate, broad-based relief in their original stimulus proposals, but I'm glad that the stimulus package that was recently passed by Congress does," Obama said.
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These crumbs from the Master's table aren't going to help Americans do anything except survive as dependents, maybe for a week. What Americans need is jobs, decent jobs, and the decent wages which go with them, and liberals know nothing about how to provide them with those.
