« ISBS Movie Review: Up | Main | Partying Like With a Rockstar, Part 2 »
McCain to America: Told ya’ so…
By Brian | June 17, 2009 | Share on Facebook
I haven’t blogged about politics in quite a while (OK, I haven’t blogged about anything in quite a while, but that’s another story), but this caught my eye:
Obama Sees 10% Unemployment Rate, Chides Wall Street Critics
[Obama] left open the possibility he would have to raise taxes on most Americans to decrease the deficit if growth were too weak. He also indicated he might tax the most-expensive employer-provided benefits to help pay for his health-care revamp. Both would reverse pledges he made during the campaign.
The president has repeatedly said he would keep his presidential campaign pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of working Americans while rolling back tax breaks for households making more than $250,000 a year. During the campaign, Obama opposed taxing employer-provided health-care benefits, a proposal gaining traction among Senate Democrats to pay for a $1 trillion health-care plan.
Throughout the campaign, McCain insisted that Obama would raise taxes on middle class Americans, despite the fact that Obama’s plans called for only raising them on the wealthy. McCain said that Obama’s record suggested he would revert to higher taxes when times got tough. This strikes me as the kind of perceptive thinking that McCain so successfully covered in a pile of talking points that I wound up voting for his opponent.
While link-hopping from this story, I also came across this from the final Presidential debate (Oct 15, 2008):
Obama: What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut . . . What I want to emphasize . . . is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as- you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.
Compare that to this:
Seems a few dollars sqeezed through without an additional cut that matches, no?
And finally, on a lighter note (depending how you look at things, I guess) I know that Newsweek’s editor at large recently compared President Obama to God, but does that mean that Bloomberg needs to put a halo on him in their picture? Sheesh…
Topics: Political Rantings | 13 Comments »
I think you (and John McCain, and Fox News) heard something very different from what Obama was saying when he promised that tax cut. He said, “I’m cutting taxes on 95% of Americans.” And if I remember correctly, he fulfilled that promise when his budget passed Congress.
What you seem to have heard is the unstated clause, “…and having done that, I’m not going to change taxes for those people, ever again.” Which he did not say, nor has any politician said that since George HW Bush made that idiotic mistake in 1988. Because, as I’m sure you learned in Wharton 101 (and as I learned in Radical Leftist Politics 101), changing your tax incentives is a great way of getting people to change how they act, and that’s a powerful governmental tool you don’t want to leave off the table.
As for your swipe at pay-go — if Bush got to divide history into pre-9/11 and post-9/11 (which charmingly makes the rest of time post-9/11), then I think it’s valid for Obama to divide his spending policies into pre-financial collapse and post-financial collapse. He’s banking his policies (and the economy) on a Keynesian stimulus, and that’s what one looks like.
IMO, it’s also valid to say, “Okay, so what the hell happens when we reach 2019 and the national debt is over $20 trillion?” I’d like an answer to that myself. But the valid time to start answering that question, IMO, is after we have some sort of evidence as to what the stimulus is doing (i.e., does Keynesian policy work?), and where we’re going to land thereafter.
Acceptance speech (8/28/08):
Regarding the things Obama actually *said*: “Under my plan, no family… will see any form of tax increase.” So that’s the part that was signed, sealed, and delivered, yes?
Regarding what words other people are putting into his mouth, it seems to me that there’s a basic issue of mathematics that’s being ignored. On the day Obama proposes tax increases which, in general, raises people’s taxes more than he lowered them, then you can say he’s increased their taxes. At least, if you’re using a sane standard. If you’re using an insane standard, then you can pick any change in the tax rates ranging from gasoline to cigarettes to international tariffs, and claim that Obama’s broken his word.
But even by that insane standard, you’re basing this argument on some very thin gruel. The Bloomberg quote basically has the president saying, “If we don’t have plenty of growth, we’re going to have problems.” This strikes me as newsworthy on the order of “it sometimes rains in Washington”. From there, a quantum leap is made to say that “Obama won’t rule out across-the-board tax increases” — which only makes sense if that was the direct question Obama was responding to. Seems to me that a quantum leap to say “Obama is considering legalizing heroin and cocaine so he can tax them” is based on about as much fact at the moment.
Therefore, the reason this is gotcha journalism: let’s assume the question was, “are you considering a middle-class tax hike?” (Because if it weren’t, the article as written is journalistic malpractice.) He can answer in three ways:
1) Make news by changing his policy on the spot, and say “yes, I’m considering scrapping what I accomplished three months ago.”
2) Make news by changing his policy on the spot, and say “no new taxes whatsoever.”
3) Stick with his policy and say, “I’m hoping for growth to solve this problem for us.”
At which point, a responsible journalist could state that the administration doesn’t have a public plan for what he’ll do in the alternative. An irresponsible journalist could make stuff up on the basis that Obama didn’t box himself in by explicitly ruling it out.
As for my former thesis advisor, Kathleen is breaking the rules that she herself set for punditry — unless of course, since the excerpt doesn’t make this clear, she was referring to the impressions raised in the reasonable person by what McCain said about Obama. My wager is on the misquote or the poor attribution — Kathleen’s failing is that she’s easy to inveigle into a 90-minute conversation, from which it’s easy to pull a misquote.
Therefore your post, as far as I can tell, is based on the following revelation: “Some people are saying that Obama’s tax policies won’t work, which validates the guy who said this last year when he was running against the man.” To which I say, when Obama gives that speech, we can have this debate like rational human beings.
But that’s not the wingnut part. So far, you’re just listening to made-up stuff and thinking it’s reality. The wingnut part is where you said that Obama had “plenty of time” to completely revamp his economic strategy between mid-September and the last debate. The way I remember it, his post-collapse message was consistent: “My original plan is good, and I’m sticking with it. Obviously, some response is vitally necessary to the new crisis, and we’re working on that. Until I have one, though, I’m not going to try to pull one out of my ass extemporaneously.” This struck me — and it seems, most of the country — as a reasonable way to approach the issue.
Then two months later, he said something about spending $2 trillion, having given it some thought.
The corollary wingnut part: one way to judge politicians is to start squawking like a chicken any time he says or does anything that contradicted what he said in his campaign. The other way is to hope we haven’t elected unthinking automata who can’t respond to reality — because eight years of that is quite enough, thank you.
So I *am* going to squawk like a chicken about things like continued military tribunals, because that contradicts the spirit *and* the letter of what he campaigned on — but I’m not squawking to bring the man down, I’m trying to give him the political capital to make a shift back to that position easier. And I’ll do the same if his future tax changes — when he announces them, that is — are profoundly regressive.
But the real icing on the wingnut cake: the days of blaming George W. Bush and what he
When you’re making the same argument as the guy who’s playing a wingnut….
Again, since I apparently wasn’t clear the last time: you keep saying “Obama left open the possibility” as if it’s a presidential quote. But no such quote appears in the article; you’re quoting the reporter. This appears to be based on the absence of a statement, which had it been made, would have been a change in policy.
I can
I will point out a couple of things just for future quoting purposes:
– Bloomberg.com is different than other press outlets. They accept little to no advertising on their site, and market almost exclusively to Wall Street professionals. They’re much more dependent on their reputation for accuracy than their ability to stir up controversy or sensationalism to sell ad space. All of that said, 100% agree that they could definitely have gotten this wrong.
– I find it fascinating that you almost travelled to Jersey to bitch-slap me when I suggested that FDR’s policies had a downside, and now you’re saying that Obama’s modeling his presidency after FDR and you’ve had the bejuses scared out of you by rapidly increased debt that may never get paid back (like FDR’s…)
– Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy, he didn’t raise them (tricke-down, remember?)
– All I’ve been hearing from economists I know is that the Kenseyian model, which seems to have been fairly predictive for the last 25 years, seems to have stopped applying, and now we’re more in Adam Smith land. That’s always been my beef with economic theories. When one stops working, it’s not discounted. It’s simply replaced with another one that works better for the time being.
Actually, what bugs me
Here, I think we agree. Obama’s policies are very much like FDR’s. My fear is not so much about raising the debt per se, but about our discipline about paying it down. My discussion of FDR in a previous post was precisely about how FDR’s policies provided the societal carte blanche to carry high levels of debt long-term, or as you restate it, “completely recast[ing] the conventional view of the impact he had.” One other thing: Unlike FDR, I think Obama has “taken advantage of the crisis” (his words) and has incurred more debt than was necessary to achieve his goals, but more on that later.
Looks like you
So I don’t think we’re looking at a change in policy here, but we are looking at the first (to my knowledge) acknowledgement that his tax pledge only works under a certain set of assumptions, and that if those assumptions are violated, we will “continue to have problems.”
Bloomberg’s reporting of this exchange as “leaving the door open to raising taxes across the board” was, in my opinion, way too general a statement; they should have gone into some of this detail or at least linked to the transcript.
Also, I’m disappointed that Hunt didn’t connect the policies Obama’s proposing to curtail growth with his concurrent assumption of strong growth. This, in my opinion, is the biggest bet that Obama’s placing on our short-term economic future at this point.
FamilyGreenberg.Com is proudly powered by WordPress.
The template is from RFDN and has been modified extensively by yours truly
Here is the RSS feed for the Entries and here is the RSS feed for the Comments