A Brilliant Obama Idea

Joe Doakes notes that Obama is singing conservatives’ tune:

President Obama slipped and called for a flat tax:

The president welcomed the charge. “I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare,” he told the Rose Garden crowd of 200. “I think it’s just the right thing to do.”

Exactly!  Everyone should pay the same, flat tax!

Cool: I propose 15% flat tax across the board, no exemptions, no deductions, no credits. Employer withholds it so no income tax form to file because there’s never a refund. Lay off half the IRS and taxpayers save trillions in lost productive hours, no longer filling out silly forms.

Almost seems too good to be true to you?  Of course it does:

Of course he didn’t mean that. He meant something different entirely. But hey – you offered it, we’ll take it, thanks.

Pass that bill and make him look stupid vetoing it.

Note to John Kline and Erik Paulsen: wanna get carried back to Washington in January 2013 on the shoulders of twenty million people who’ve had enough?  Take Obama up on his newfound desire for tax fairness, and introduce the flat tax.

7 thoughts on “A Brilliant Obama Idea

  1. Or the FAIR tax, which has the added benefits of solving our trade problem with China, and of completely reforming the Social Security system, among others.

  2. Note to John Kline and Erik Paulsen: wanna get carried back to Washington in January 2013 on the shoulders of twenty million people who’ve had enough? Take Obama up on his newfound desire for tax fairness, and introduce the flat tax.

    I kind of doubt it, both Kline and Paulsen voted to increase the debt ceiling by $1.4 Trillion and worse still, voted for the spending that lead to it. I think a lot of fiscal conservatives are getting tired of sending Republicans to Washington who think that so long as they support tax cuts or tax reform, that it even comes close to making up for the spending and borrowing that they’ve enacted. Frankly voters in the 2CD and 3CD could do better.

  3. Quite frankly, I am very concerned about Paulsen’s chances at reelection. I have seen him in action at a couple of his recent TH meetings. He is dodging the questions on his stances on medicare and social security reforms and I think that it is leaving him vulnerable to the transplanted daughter of a union goon from Plymouth.

  4. Quite frankly, I am very concerned about Paulsen’s chances at reelection. I have seen him in action at a couple of his recent TH meetings. He is dodging the questions on his stances on medicare and social security reforms and I think that it is leaving him vulnerable to the transplanted daughter of a union goon from Plymouth.

    Agreed, the fact is that the current entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are unsustainable in their current forms and tough and unpopular decisions need to be made sooner rather than later or else the younger generations are going to be bankrupted by these programs. The sort of dance that Paulsen and others seem to be playing of trying to avoid alienating voters with unpopular but necessary proposals only works so long as they can keep it up. The day of reckoning isn’t getting any further away with the baby boom generation continuing to age and entitlements expected to continue to grow as a percentage of the federal budget. As soon as these choices are made, he’s going to lose the vote of everyone who voted for him because he promised not to “touch” Medicare or Social Security. On the other hand, someone who is up front with voters about these difficult choices (not just acknowledging that in the abstract they need to be made but also what they might be and what they might be willing to do) is going to be the one has right set expectations with the voters and is most likely to have earned their trust and support when we can no longer put off these difficult and unpopular choices.

  5. Megan McCardle comments on the “Buffet Rule”:

    Instead, it claims to do this, while rehashing a bunch of things that the administration has long proposed: allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for those making more than $250,000; changing the treatment of carried interest income accrued from capital gains; and altering the treatment of deductions for very high earners. If all of these things were passed, guess who would still pay a lower effective tax rate than his secretary? Hint: his initials are WB, and he lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/whats-wrong-with-the-buffett-rule/245451/

  6. Here is another bit from Megan McCardle’s post:

    “The only way to actually ensure that no millionaire, anywhere, pays less than 20% on their annual income would be to essentially suspend the rule of law for wealthy people, and give the IRS power to seize income from rich people at will within some very broad guideline about fair shares. ”

    That is the heart of prog bloggers like Kevin Drum’s wish list. Run roughshod over the Constitution and anything else in the way in order to confiscate wealth from those deemed to be unfairly compensated. Who else orchestrated similar plans? Well, Hitler like to pick on the Jews, Mao and Pol Pot pretty much took out anybody with an education. A long list of despots, to be sure. Readers can supply their own.

  7. Golfdoc, it is difficult to comprehend the idiocy that is Kevin Drum. It’s hard to believe that anyone thinks that Drum is competent to write about economic and political matters.
    In this post (written when Bush II was attempting to turn a portion of SS funds into private accounts), Drum not only wildly overestimates the amount of time it will take for the SS fund to become insolvent, he also refers to some mysterious “deal” made by Greenspan and the “well off” of the 1980’s that the “well off” of the future would pay higher taxes in return for today’s “well off” being under-taxed.
    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_01/005446.php
    This “deal” seems to only have existed in the mind of Kevin Drum. How in the world can one group of people make a contract that binds an entirely different group of future people to do anything? To prove his point Drum refers to . . . another article he has written that asserts the same thing: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005236.php

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