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Barack Obama's "Tax Cut" Plan is Deceitful

jimmiebjr | October 13, 2008 | 4 Replies

I’ve seen about a bazillion Barack Obama commercials that have claimed that he will cut taxes for either 95 percent of “families” or “American workers”. Not a single time have I heard him, his campaign, or any of his commercials say that he’ll cut taxes on 95 percent of American taxpayers.

That’s because his plan won’t. He uses a couple little rhetorical tricks to deceive us about his alleged “tax cut”. Suffice it to say that Barack Obama won’t cut taxes on nearly as many folks as he claims, if it indeed cuts taxes for anyone at all.

The Wall Street Journal sets the record straight:

One of Barack Obama’s most potent campaign claims is that he’ll cut taxes for no less than 95% of “working families.” He’s even promising to cut taxes enough that the government’s tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% — which is lower than it is today.
It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of “tax cut.”

That number, according to the Tax Foundation is 33 percent. And what they mean by “pay no income taxes at all” is that after they’ve filled out their income tax return, that number that shows how much taxes they owe is zero and not people who get a tax refund back. Those folks, after all the deductions and credits, get something back when they’ve put nothing in. Barack Obama wants to greatly increase that number and he will do that by taking more from the people who do pay taxes to give it to those who do not while telling us it’s really a “tax cut”.

That’s a sneaky, underhanded way of expanding the disastrous welfare state and it’s flat-out wrong.