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“This is a man who wants to punish the rich regardless of its effect on the economy.”

“This is a man who wants to punish the rich regardless of its effect on the economy.”

Krauthammer on Obama and Raising the Capital Gains Tax

Last night on Special Report with Bret Baier, Bret asked Charles Krauthammer for his thoughts on Obama’s proposal to raise the capital gains tax.

Krauthammer pointed out that like all things Obama says and does, this is about left wing political ideology.

Via National Review:

Krauthammer’s Take: Obama ‘Wants to Punish the Rich Regardless of Effect on Economy’

The president’s proposal to raise the capital gains tax has nothing to do with America’s economic vitality, and everything to do with ideology, says Charles Krauthammer.

“Obama was asked about whether raising the capital gains tax is something he would support even — this was a famous question asked by Charlie Gibson in the run-up to the 2008 campaign — even if it lowered revenues, which it does, which is of course totally illogical; you raise taxes to bring in revenue. Obama’s answer, a famous answer, was, yes, in the name of ‘fairness.’”​

“This is a man who wants to punish the rich regardless of its effect on the economy,” said Krauthammer.

Watch the exchange:

Obama seems set on denying the reality of the new Republican-controlled Senate.

Marc A. Thiessen addressed the issue yesterday at the Washington Post:

Obama uses his tax proposal to taunt the GOP

Let’s imagine you were a Democratic president who just lost control of Congress to the Republicans, and you wanted to make it really, really clear that you are not serious about governing. What would you do? Simple: Use your State of the Union address to propose hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes that will never be enacted, in order to fund a slew of new government programs that have no chance of being approved.

Welcome to President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address.

On Tuesday night, Obama will ask the new Republican Congress to approve $320 billion in tax increases. To see how absurd this is, imagine for a moment what the reaction would have been if, after losing control of Congress to the Democrats in 2006, President George W. Bush had used his next State of the Union address to propose $320 billion in growth-oriented tax cuts. Would anyone have taken him seriously? The media would have dismissed Bush as delusional. Democrats would have laughed. Everyone would have asked: What’s wrong with him? Didn’t he get the message of the 2006 midterms? What planet is he on?

Is everybody ready to watch the SOTU?

Featured image via YouTube.

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Comments

legacyrepublican | January 20, 2015 at 8:07 am

Potential GOP response: “Elections have consequences”

yes, in the name of ‘fairness.’

I guess he was referring to the Fairness Amendment to the Constitution.

Questions we need to ask Presidential candidates:

As far as I know there is no official definition and I’ve been told in some languages it is just not defined, so please .. define “fair”

    FrankNatoli in reply to Neo. | January 20, 2015 at 9:23 am

    “Fair” in the Democrat dictionary: government empowered envy.

      But there it is buried on page 9 of the leaked document: “The President’s plan will roll back expanded tax cuts for 529 education savings plans that were enacted in 2001 for new contributions…” Note that this is right before they also announce the repeal of Coverdell Education Savings Accounts (Coverdell ESAs), another similar move against the same middle class savings targets.

      … I read this as Malia had trouble getting accepted to the college she wanted and Sasha’s grades are even worse.

      This is to get those fifty middle class folks out of the elite schools.
      Let them eat community college.

What I don’t get is the thought process of anyone who actually supports this. What is it going to solve?

Even if you outright robbed every “rich” person in the USA, it wouldn’t even make a tiny dent in the national debt.

The problem is that the government is not doing what the vast majority of us MUST do and that is live within its means.

All this spending for new social programs, supporting illegal immigrants, the ACA , etc etc. Who, exactly, is paying for it? Where is the government getting the money? Isn’t it 17+ trillion in the red?

Obama and his supporters can go to hell !

http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/to?iso=20161108T07&p0=611&msg=Countdown+until+Obama+is+OUT+OF+OFFICE

What was it that dim bulb Congressman said a few years ago (his name escapes me). He justified Obamacare, taxes, etc. as allowable under the “Goodness and Wellness” clause of the Constitution.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to find that one…

Listening to the stream of consciousness ramblings of a collectivist community organizer who ‘fundamentally transforms” the truth every time he speaks is not worth my time.

And, how about collecting back taxes from IRS employees and Al Sharpton before any mention of a new punitive tax?

Someone said yesterday that Obama was just trolling the GOP now.

As pertains to the SOTUS, he’d be doing it to my MT chair if I were in Congress.

Which is more polite than my first inclination…which is to moon Barrracula.

Remember during the 2008 Democrat presidential candidate debates, when Obama said he wanted to undo the capital gains tax cuts and jack the tax rate up to its previous maximum. When asked in follow up [I believe by Charlie Gibson] if he realized that historically the highest tax rate resulted in the lowest tax revenues, Obama replied that it was in the interest of “fairness”.

Obama and the people who voted for him, the majority of the country, twice, define “fairness” as punishing the “rich” even or perhaps especially if that also has the consequence of minimizing tax revenues [to redistribute to those who did nothing to earn them in the first place]. Nice.

Except that this does little to punish the very rich, who can manipulate the tax code to their advantage. The people this really hurts are the middle class who are trying to amass some wealth.

obama’s main constituencies are the very, very rich and the poor. This is an assault on those in the middle who work for a living and are unlikely to cast their ballots for him.

    FrankNatoli in reply to jim_m. | January 20, 2015 at 10:33 am

    “obama’s main constituencies are the very, very rich and the poor”
    What about the DC beltway types that have completely flipped the political orientation of the entire state of Virginia? Or the affluent downstate areas of New York that guarantee an extreme Liberal like Cuomo gets elected? Twice? Or the wealthiest state in the union, California, with its overwhelming Democrat vote? And for that matter the same types in Oregon and Washington State?

      Semper Why in reply to FrankNatoli. | January 20, 2015 at 11:42 am

      Those “DC Beltway types” are the very rich. Fairfax County is the richest county in the nation. The median income in the county is six digits. The median house price is in the $400K range. The Virginia suburbs of DC make up three of the top 5 wealthiest counties in the country by median income.

      By contrast, the median income in Washington DC proper is only $66K and the median price of a house in the severely space-restricted district itself is about the same as its VA suburb. DC’s poverty rate is about 18% vs Fairfax’s rate of 5.6%.

      If you were trying to tell us that Obama is aiming at the middle class, Fairfax VA is not the middle class.

        FrankNatoli in reply to Semper Why. | January 20, 2015 at 2:33 pm

        The very, very rich, at least in my dictionary, are the 10**8 or 10**9 dollar types, Gates, Buffett, Bloomberg. While they may possess an enormous amount of wealth, they have very, very few votes. It’s the college educated or post-graduate educated types that I’m talking about. Well educated with zero common sense.

Tonight every Republican member of Congress should:

a) stand in unison and shout out a good old Joe Wilson-esque “YOU LIE!”

b) turn their backs on this destructive, lying prick like the NYPD officers did to their Marxist Mayor

c) walk out and leave the narcissist to preen himself in front of his teleprompter and his disgusting sycophantic progressive drones on the other side of the isle

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | January 20, 2015 at 10:07 am

I’ve decided the mid-term elections are the ones that matter. The people who show up for them are informed. They care about policy. The presidential elections have become about celebrity. Media events with faux Greek columns and all that phony nonsense. It’s whoever has the most tech savvy, campaign savvy, media savvy campaign wins. It’s not about policy. Obama know how to get votes. But the people who matter – the ones who are informed and care about policy – don’t support his policies.

Many presidential election voters are not equipped to vote on policy. Obama’s campaign staff understood this brilliantly. That’s why they had people registering people who had never voted before by going weekly into black hair salons, black churches, black nail salons to get them registered. Conservatives mocked Obama for appearing on the urban radio program of some guy named “The Pimp With the Limp”, but Obama was reaching his base of low information voters. But what was especially brilliant was how they got left wing media to use emotional demagoguery to say that voter ID laws passed mostly by Republicans were intended to suppress minority voters. First they went out and got all those blacks who had not been registered before registered, then they created a faux controversy about “voter suppression” to mobilize them and get them to turn out and vote against Republicans who were “trying to keep them down”. Masterful emotional demagoguery. Of course, black turn out exceeded white turnout for the first time ever in ’12 – even though Obama got several million fewer total votes in ’12 than he got in ’08.

I don’t think mid-term voters are as easy to manipulate. I am convinced they vote regularly in large part BECAUSE they care more about policy and the direction of the country.

And yet I am now reading stories that Republicans are going to cave on fighting both Obamacare AND Obama’s executive amnesty, two of the policy initiatives almost every elected Republican ran against in ’14 to get them elected and give them the majority. Voters showed up to vote Republican because they hate Democrat policy, and now the Republicans they elected are going to betray them and not even put up much of a fight against the policies they voted against. It’s undemocratic and disgraceful.

I have come to really hate the GOP leadership.

Hillary Clinton reminded us during one of the debates that Obama’s idea of “rich” goes all the way down to your basic “firefighter plus school teacher” household.

Further, our economy is just barely beginning to climb out of a recession prolonged by Obama’s policies. The black middle class has not yet seen much advantage.

Margaret Thatcher, as usual, nailed it, when she referred to some people who are “content that the poor remain poor as long as the rich are less rich.”

It’s liberal tax & spend boilerplate:

-Tax from the rich to take advantage of jealousy among the people.

-Sell the tax further by claiming it will go to the middle class where all the voters are.

-But give it to the poor instead via Awesome New Programs to bump that Romney Equation up from 47%.

Except the House will never pass it, which Obama knows. The whole thing is for Obama to make sweet promises of awesome gifts for The People he’s all about, just so the MSM can film the Republicans breaking all of Obama’s sweet promises. These MSM soundbites of Republicans explaining why they’re rejecting this or that Obama Sweet Promise will be compiled, edited down to 30 seconds each, then packaged and shipped directly to the DNC.

This is a man who thinks that America needs a fundamental transformation.
This is a man who is not proud of America and the values she stands for.
This is a man who has no problem following those who preach “God damn America.”

This is a man who shouldn’t have been President in the first place, and yet he was elected twice. It’s a sad day and age.

At a debate in Elmira in the recent Congressional election, the audience laughed at then candidate Martha Robertson for her “war on women” rhetoric, which encapsulated how far her message was from reality. Perhaps Republicans in Congress should do the same thing with this President, who doesn’t seem to understand how irrelevant he is now is, a lame duck whose ideas led to a disaster for his party. He can issue executive orders and memos, but legislation is beyond him. Outside of those areas in which he can still act, the best way to treat him is as a joke who has 731 days left in office. With no elections left for him, this president can say what he wants but no one has to believe him or take his legislative desires seriously. He can still damage this country domestically and in foreign affairs, but his days of passing his legislative program vanished in the mid-term election.

Investing sucks. I can buy a boat with the money now… screw the future. The government will take care of me in my old age anyway.

    MikeE in reply to Andy. | January 20, 2015 at 12:53 pm

    Just wait until you see just how well the government actually takes care of those post-retirement. You may be singing a different tune.

“On Tuesday night, Obama will ask the new Republican Congress to approve $320 billion in tax increases.”

But he’s selling those increases as a good deal for Joe and Jane Smith. He’ll present it as such, the folks will buy it, and then he sits back as the GOP destructs because they won’t support it.

Obama is simply attempting to win cheap political points, which (he hopes) will translate into some number of votes for Democrats.

When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on the vote of Paul.

Pathetic.

Earth to Krauthammer – you’re in a bubble!

Obama does NOT want to “punish the rich”… O wants to “punish those who have worked hard for their own money, prop up the economy with free market enterprise yet do NOT donate to his 100% full time coffer filling ventures…”

…. there, fixed it for ya