Obama is refocusing his campaign on attacking the Top 5%.
As documented here in great detail, that’s where Obama started during the 2008 campaign.
Over time Obama narrowed the demonization to the Top 2%, then the Top 1%, then a few hundred people who might pay more under the “Buffett Rule.”
Apparently that narrowing didn’t work. The public wasn’t interested in a public flogging of a relatively few folks.
So today Obama refocused the campaign on those whose incomes put them approximately in the Top 5% (he says top 2%, but I think his math is off, see below):
With a torpid job market and a fragile economy threatening his re-election chances, President Obama is changing the subject to tax fairness, calling for a one-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for people making less than $250,000 [jointly]….The president’s proposal could also put him at odds with Democratic leaders like Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who have advocated extending the cuts for everyone who earns up to $1 million….
Here’s a reminder of how good those Top 5% (based on individual returns) supposedly have it under our tax code (data through 2009 tax year):
The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI equal to or greater than $154,643), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 31.7 percent of the nation’s adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.
They’re making out like bandits! That’s not fair!
Pathetic, divisive, agitational (my made-up word), any other words which come to mind from yet this latest ploy?
Feel free to make up words which capture the essence of our leader’s campaign, since the English language cannot fully explicate where we are as a nation on July 9, 2012.
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