Obama: Taxing the Middle Class? "All Ideas Are On The Table"

Bumped by ace. Waterloo 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Promises, promises, you knew you'd never keep:

President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Much more at the link.

Later: Obama calls this prudence. He doesn't want to seem like he's crossing ideas off the list because "pretty soon you just can't solve the problem."

Except his "prudence", his forbearance from hasty action, contradicts the promise he made repeatedly during the campaign. Because if he had to stick to his promise--no taxes--he'd more likely have to do something he really doesn't want to do: rein in spending.

His promise got hard to keep. So he's throwing it under the bus.

More [ace]: This really shocks me, and I'm not being sarcastic.

The man is now talking about breaking the key promise he made 40 times on the campaign trail -- that no one making less than $250,000 would see their taxes go up "a single dime."

He's effectively telling every middle-class citizen who voted for him: Go f--- yourselves.

I'm not sure what he's thinking. Not only will he not be able to achieve this -- even Congressional Democrats will revolt -- the very idea he's talking about it may doom him.

What is this -- some kind of threat to the public "either give me my way or else their will be consequences"?

I can only imagine he's trying to link this to his nonsense claims about reducing the deficit by adding 30 million people to the federal health-care benefits rolls. Either I can reduce the deficit my way or this other way, he might be trying to claim.

It's preposterous, but he justifies all this by saying he doesn't want to rule anything out, but in fact he's ruling a lot out -- like stopping with all the spending and putting his health-care plans on permanent hold.

Of course, the White House tipped its hand on this seven months ago:

posted by Gabriel Malor at 05:40 PM

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