With the economy threatening to fall into another recession and job growth plummeting, Obama came before the American people today demanding taxes be raised on those making over $250,000 a year, including what he admitted would include 3% of small businesses. Even if that 3% is correct, which is disputed, that 3% means a tax increase on 900,000 small businesses.
That’s nearly a million small business owners who will now be even more crippled and have less capital available to expand their payrolls — which of course means fewer jobs for the middle class and the poor who would like to someday enter the middle class.
Moreover, Obama’s announcement today puts him to the left of Nancy Pelosi, who is only proposing raising taxes on those making over $1 million a year.
And who knew this was even possible, but Obama has moved to the left of even himself. In this video you can watch the President emphatically state that raising taxes on anyone, including the wealthy, during a recession is a bad idea:
[W]e have not proposed a tax hike for the wealthy that would take effect in the middle of a recession. Even the proposal that have come out of Congress, which by the way were different than the proposals I put forward, still wouldn’t kick in until after the recession was over. So he’s absolutely right. The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession.
Obama and his media apologists will state that we’re not in a recession now, and that’s a key difference. But it’s actually not. Officially, the Great Recession ended in June of 2009 and Obama made this statement in August of 2009. The economy was staggering out of a recession then and might be staggering towards one now.
So why the change?
Obama is panicking, pure and simple. Since April, Obama’s outspent Romney and gone hard-negative, but his poll numbers haven’t moved. And Romney hasn’t even started to make his case yet. So Obama is left playing a frantic and erratic game of checkers, hoping he can win news cycles and win voters through the cynical division of the American people by economic class.
The media, naturally, is playing along. All day you’ve seen them declare that what Obama intends to do is “extend tax cuts for the middle class,” when in reality he’s demanding a tax increase — according to his own numbers — on nearly a million job creators.
Both Obama and the media are once again putting what’s best for our country, especially those struggling in the middle class, behind what’s best for a failed president’s reelection.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC