What surprises me most about this poll isn’t that 69 percent of Americans think that Preisdent Obama will break his promise not to raise taxes on everyone except C. Montgomery Burns and the Monopoly Guy but that 31 percent don’t actually realize he’s already done it.
It’s not like the President doesn’t have a few more big tax hikes just waiting in the wings, and why shouldn’t he? If you sold one tax hike with the improbable theory that raising taxes will bring in gobs more revenue for an expensive health care program, why wouldn’t you do it again and again? Every tax hike you get now will become a lever of control you can pull later, which is the real progressive purpose for them in the first place.
Of course, eventually the voters get wise to your not particularly clever scheme and you have to find some other way to get what you want. From the looks of the Fox News poll numbers (PDF Link), he’s running out of clever options and may end up having to go the brute force route. That won’t be for a few months, though. He still has his clueless third out there believing he won’t ever do what he’s already done. He can get a lot of publicity mileage out of the earnest way they ask questions at his town hall meetings and they way they report the news.
(Cross-posted at the Pink Elephant Pundit)
Tags: Opinion Polls, President Barack Obama, Taxes
You can avoid the tax by not smoking. It’s a tax increase, for sure, but it’s a voluntary tax. And look, I’m a smoker, so it’s not like I’m totally unsympathetic. But smoking is still a major cause of health problems and substantially shortens one’s life. Well, most people’s, I’ll die young anyway. If you have to tax something, tobacco is probably the best thing to tax. The change in the RYO tobacco may seem extreme, but the new tax brings the tax in line with pre-rolled cigarettes. Some quick measurements on a pack of American Spirits yield a tax of about $28/lb vs $24/lb for RYO. So it’s as fair as the other tobacco taxes. I’m generally for these kinds of taxes. It’s better than taxing desirable elements of society, like income.
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Regardless of whether it’s a “good” tax or not, the President still broke his promise. He is, for the record, still promising no new tax increases. So not he’s not merely breaking a promise, but actively lying.