Bonnie Erbe

Obama Will Raise Your Taxes, Despite Campaign Promise

June 11, 2009 RSS Feed Print

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

New numbers from Rasmussen Reports show few Americans believe their taxes will go up under the Obama administration. One wonders, what are these people thinking? Data released yesterday show only 36 percent of Americans believe their personal taxes will rise under President Obama. Guess they drank the campaign Kool-Aid when candidate Obama pledged he would raise taxes only on families with incomes above $250,000.

I blogged recently about proposals to fund the Obama healthcare reform program with taxes levied on other peoples' company sponsored health insurance. Hello, America: This means new taxes on benefits that are not taxed and it could hit working Americans at all levels of pay. The idea is not law yet--just a proposal. But if anyone but the poorest Americans believes he or she will be paying less in taxes by the end of this administration than at its beginning, that person needs to spend more time reading news reports.

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Tags:
Barack Obama,
taxes

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As an American living in Europe, I have come to appreciate how I can decide how much I spend and where my money goes at the end of the day. My hostfamily does not see half of the money that was in their job contracts and the schools and universities are falling apart. They have to wait for months to get simple outpatient surgeries. AND they pay 8 times our gas rates. Where does their money go?! When the same thing starts happening to our money and you can't get a precancerous mole taken off for 14 months because a rush of 46 million previously uninsured people need care, I will only say i told you so. Cherish being able to choose where your money goes. p.s. to the European who said we should ride bicycles to get rid of our excess fat... Europe is not far behind.

Lauren 4:11AM July 17, 2009

The poor don't have any benefits to tax. That's the point of SCHIP and the public option plan.

So you think Obama will be the first person since...George HW Bush...to raise taxes against campaign promises. And before him Reagan.

Steve of NJ 8:59PM June 17, 2009

Americans somehow must pay back their debts. Individually they must, but also as a country. Perhaps they should pay more for their gasoline, like we do in Europe. Let the US Federal Governmemt slash on a dollar tax on each gallon of gas. This will not raise the price close to what we Europeans are paying, but it is a start to fight your deficit.

Such a price rise will perhaps pay of a little of the US debts, but more importantly it may have the other effects. Less mileage driven by your gas guzzling cars, people will walk and ride bicycles more and perhaps loose some of their excess fat, but more importantly it will force you to buy more economic cars. Time is up for 8 cylinder trucks. It will now be 4 cylinder rabbits.

We are at peak oil anyway. If the government won't raise the price of gas, your oil companies will do anyway. So, happy walking.

Jaap Ketel 3:20AM June 12, 2009

Bonnie Erbe

Bonnie Erbe

Bonnie Erbe is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and hosts PBS's weekly news analysis program, To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe. She also writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column for Scripps Howard News Service.

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