Isn’t true if you engage in a lifestyle that most people find icky. You know that pledge that if you make less than $250,000/year you won’t see an increase in your taxes? Yeah, well not if you smoke.
One of President Barack Obama’s campaign pledges on taxes went up in puffs of smoke Wednesday.
The largest increase in tobacco taxes took effect despite Obama’s promise not to raise taxes of any kind on families earning under $250,000 or individuals under $200,000.
This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.
To be sure, Obama’s tax promises in last year’s campaign were most often made in the context of income taxes. Not always.
“I can make a firm pledge,” he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” He repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.”[emphasis added]
Ho hum, another politician another lie.
The extra money will be used to finance a major expansion of health insurance for children.
It’s for the children? Well okay then.
That represents a step toward achieving another promise, to make sure all kids are covered.
What? He isn’t going to try and claim that such a program will provide an economic stimulus therefore we should spend the money absent any tax increases? And I thought he could do all this without increasing taxes. Didn’t he said, he’d cut waste, fraud and abuse? Oh, wait they always say that. The Obamassiah…just like any other lying politician.
His detailed campaign plan stated that his proposed improvement in health insurance and health technology “is more than covered” by raising taxes on the wealthy alone. It was not based on raising the tobacco tax.
Somebody is not drinking the kool-aid.
“Listen now,” he said in his widely watched nomination acceptance speech, “I will cut taxes—cut taxes—for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.”
Yeah, well that was a lie too, or at least it was a statement with enough weasel words in it so that it doesn’t mean what one’s first impression would be. According to the Tax Policy Center, only about 75.5% of households will get a tax cut under Obama’s plan. And factoring in the new tax on cigarettes that number is likely to be smaller.
