Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Barack Obama | Economy | Tax Policy — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Raising taxes is an unpopular enterprise, so in order to pull it off, one has to engage in more than a bit of class warfare. One has to talk about "raising taxes just for the rich" or some other such nonsense in order to sell the tax hike--this despite the fact that the rich actually pay a huge share of the taxes in this country and that the more such class envy we see in efforts to sell tax hikes, the more Atlas may shrug.

All of this is a prelude to a discussion of Barack Obama's tax policy, which as Stephen Moore points out, should induce more than a little consternation on the part of readers and voters:

Barack Obama has been on a class-warfare tirade since he locked up the nomination, accusing John McCain of defending Bush tax cuts for "the rich." "For eight long years," he said Monday in a speech laying out his economic agenda, "our president sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy, and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs."

Hmmm. Anybody even dimly acquainted with the record, especially President Bush's vast expansion of Medicare, might doubt the factual basis of such a statement. Never mind. Mr. Obama and the Congressional Democrats promise to sock it to "rich" taxpayers next year to pay for "middle class tax cuts" as well as some $300 billion in new spending. But there's a problem: They won't tell us exactly who the rich are.

In various tax proposals Mr. Obama has set the definition of rich at levels of $100,000, $200,000 and $250,000 in annual income. He has vowed, for example, to erase the Bush tax cuts not only for those who make more than $250,000, but to end the cap on Social Security taxes, which amounts to a tax hike on anyone who makes more than $100,000 in income. More recently, Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic adviser, told me the new cap might be set at $200,000.

All of this has caused some heartburn among certain Democrats in high cost-of-living states. New York Rep. Joseph Crowley says a couple with earnings of $100,000 could be "a police officer and nurse." "In New York City," he adds, "they'd be struggling."

You know, at some point, someone should really call the Obama campaign on all of this. They have no idea what "rich" means. The standards keep shifting and the Obama tax plan will hit "rich" people who don't qualify as being wealthy under any meaningful definition of the term. The economic damage this scattershot policy will do will be massive, of course.

But fear not! There are certain "rich" people who actually are rich in every sense of the term and who will do quite well in an Obama Administration. Read the rest of the Moore article to find out who they are. And here's a hint: There shall be no "windfall profits tax" on them.