The joke around the blogs has been how low will Obama, Biden and their surrogates actually drop the threshold for tax cuts. As I said before I have always believed it would be much lower than $250,000. According to a 2003 interview Obama thinks anyone making $70,000 per year is rich and deserve higher taxes. He actually says “tax cuts” should go no higher than $70,000 in the following 2003 interview while running for his Senate seat. The article is appropriately called “The Faces Of Barack Obama, From 2003 To 2004″.
Here he is in that interview:
Here is the transcript:
Well, you know the problem was is that they weren’t targeted at the short term stimulus of the economy. What we should have done is if we were going to initiate tax cuts, and I’m a strong supporter of tax cuts for working families like the Earned Income Tax Credit, to initiate things like cuts in the Social Security tax, and other taxes that are really burdensome on families that are making 50, 60, 70 thousand dollars a year. Those tax cuts I think would have stimulated the economy.
But the money that we’ve given up directly affects Illinois in its potential, in terms of job growth because it means that transportation dollars are not in the state of Illinois, heath care dollars are not in the state of Illinois. There are enormous needs around the state that we could be using that money for.
Ed Morrisey of Hot Air has more on Obama’s interview:
The EITC reference is interesting. That’s a refundable, rather than a tax cut. It’s basically a redistributive tool, although one with broad bipartisan support. No one ever talks about ending the EITC, or at least not seriously enough to matter. It does reflect Obama’s inclination to rely on refundables rather than actual rate cuts, which reflects on his current tax plans.
Obama’s top end for cuts certainly changed dramatically. If he thought that tax cuts should be limited to $70K in 2003, he hasn’t explained what changed in the following five years to move that to $250K–$200K–$150K– and now $120K. Obama could have simply changed his mind, but the ambiguity surrounding Democratic talking points in the past few weeks suggests that his commitment to the higher income levels is tenuous at best.
History tends to teach us that tax cuts at higher income levels is tenuous at best. Clinton promised to give tax cuts to the middle class. In less than a month the tax cuts only included those making less $20,000 per year. Would an Obama administration do the same thing? More than likely.
