Tell me once again, who’s the rich, elitist candidate?
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.
“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”
I mean, it’s easy to understand why he’s unsure; he’s got seven. Seven’s a large number. It’s six or seven more than most Americans have.
At any rate, the Obama campaign has helpfully run an ad that will help McCain remember next time he’s asked:
Of course, McCain responded by invoking his time in Vietnam, which must be hard, because we all know how hard it is for him to talk about it:
“This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years—in prison,” referring to the prisoner of war camp that McCain was in during the Vietnam War.
Oh, yeah, also he referenced the Rezko stuff, which is going to totally pwn Obama, right after the “Whitey” tape comes out.
Look, this is the kind of stupid, pointless issue that shouldn’t matter more than, say, John McCain’s plans to run the third Bush administration. But given that this is what the media likes to talk about, it’s a godsend for Obama. After all, most of us don’t own seven houses, most of us don’t own two, a huge percentage of us don’t even own one. Given that McCain has spent the last month talking about how Obama is totally out of the mainstream for going to Hawai’i (going to the state you were born to visit your grandma? Sheesh, don’t rub it in our faces, Barry!), this is exactly the kind of gaffe that he couldn’t make, because it wakes the media up to the fact that yes, John and Cindy McCain are a lot wealthier than Barack and Michelle Obama, and the idea that Barack is some kind of plutocrat while the son and grandson of admirals, the husband of an heiress, is just an average fella — well, it’s simply ludicrous. And that’s bad news for McCain.
i lose more and more respect for mccain every time he plays the POW card. i really, really do.
He lost a lot of money betting on the genome of bats
With echolocation, you’ve always gotta go with the bats
Right. How many houses does John Kerry own? Al Gore? He might not know because “he” probably doesn’t know because of his prenups. Like John Kerry he married a very rich woman with substantial holdings of her own that have nothing to do with him.
FLFE,
The big difference here is that McCain is calling Obama an “elite.” I don’t recall Kerry doing that to Bush nore do I recall Gore calling Bush an “elite.”
Context really does matter.
Exactly. Like I said, it’s a stupid argument, but so’s the argument that Obama’s an elitist because he knows what arugula is. So’s the argument that Obama is unqualified to be president because he’s popular. So is the argument that Obama is Muslim. Look, I’d love to see the campaign based on fair and reasoned arguments. But sorry, folks, we’ve seen what the McCain campaign wants to run on, and it’s crud like this. Live by the smear, die by the smear.
I find it kind of interesting that the actual answer to “How many houses does John McCain own?” is zero. Cindy owns a bunch of houses (4? 7? 8? 10? no one seems quite sure) but she has been careful to keep her property from becoming jointly hers and John’s. Now, I can understand why she did that originally (when a philandering gold-digger cheats on his disabled wife and the mother of his 12 year old child to marry you, you do have to worry that he is marrying you for your millions), but surely after nearly three decades, she would trust him enough to jointly own at least some of their property. For example, while John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry also kept their assets separate when they married, they also own a home together.
Of course, the other possibility (besides Cindy not trusting John) is that John finds it convenient to hide his assets from the sort of inspection that political candidates are normally subject to.
“Tell me once again, who’s the rich, elitist candidate?”
Barack Obama.
“And that’s bad news for McCain.”
Eh, not really. The fact that McCain owns a lot of houses isn’t really going to be some bombshell. I’m pretty sure that most people see elections as a rich person from one party vs. a rich one from another. I knew nothing of either’s finances until relatively recently, but being senators, I just assumed they were both pretty wealthy.
All of this is beside the point. Being rich/elite and being an elitist are not the same thing. A rich guy who doesn’t seem to care about gas prices, for example, is likely to be perceived as an elitist. Why should he care about gas prices, he’s rich.
On the other hand, the rich guy who wants to lower gas prices (or is perceived to want to) in the short-term by drilling, is simply a rich guy who, at least, cares a little about how much it costs me to get to work every day. If the latter owns a bunch of houses, good for him.
That said, I agree with Jeff that the whole issue is pretty much pointless. Some attention to other, more important matters would be nice, so just tell me who’s gonna raise my taxes so I can vote for the other guy and be done with it for another four years.
We’ll have to see how this plays out. The McCain people certainly appear to be taking this attack seriously.
Regarding who will lower your tax bill more, it depends on how much you earn. Go to this CNN page and read the chart (under the heading “Breaking Down The Numbers,” near the top of the article on the right) to see how their proposals break down.
Bottom line: If you make over $112,000 a year, you’ll pay fewer taxes with McCain. If you make less than $112,000 a year, you’ll pay fewer taxes with Obama.
You’d be an anarchist then. The lowest tax rate would be achieved by abolishing the government, selling off its assets, paying back the debt, and distributing the balance (if any) as a one-off tax refund. Then you pay nothing for ever and ever. Of course, you don’t have any roads, any schools, any police…
But you pay the least tax. So you’d vote for that guy, rather than any other guy who wants to provide any services at all.
“You’d be an anarchist then. The lowest tax rate would be achieved by abolishing the government, selling off its assets, paying back the debt, and distributing the balance (if any) as a one-off tax refund. Then you pay nothing for ever and ever. Of course, you don’t have any roads, any schools, any police…”
So anyone who objects to tax increases is an anarchist seeking to auction the government on eBay? To think they call tax-cutters “zealots.” Geesh….
More seriously, Rivercat, why not respond to Ampersand’s comment? I mean, if everyone based their decision 100% on paying higher/lower taxes, that would put slightly more than 85% of the nation in Obama’s camp.
Do you make less than $112,000?
—Myca
“I mean, if everyone based their decision 100% on paying higher/lower taxes, that would put slightly more than 85% of the nation in Obama’s camp.”
True, but not everyone does and I understand that. I don’t either, but taxation (less of it) is important to me.
“Do you make less than $112,000?”
If Obama is elected, I’ll be out 12 bucks more than I am now according to Amp’s link. That is, of course, 12 bucks according to a very simplistic analysis. Tax plans have many facets, taxes on regular income being only one. When one considers Obama’s tax proposals for capital gains and dividends and how his plan would influence effective/actual marginal rates, the increases are far more significant.
I like the fact that Obama at least acknowledges the fundamental silliness of the AMT and the estate tax (or, he at least wants to cut them slightly), but the fact is that McCain’s cuts will be deeper in these areas as well.
But you’re not “anyone who objects to tax increases”. You’re someone for whom the tax rate is the only criterion by which a candidate or party should be judged.
If one guy intends to raise your taxes by $1 in order to, say, pay back some of the public debt, and the other guy intends to leave your taxes where they are, but spend the entire budget on having statues honouring himself erected in every town square, you’d vote for the other guy.
I don’t really believe you’d do that, but it’s what you said. The position you take, whether you mean it or not, forecloses any meaningful discussion on spending (both what on, and how much), on foreign policy, on, well just about anything that actually matters.
Except that the Tax Policy Center analysis (which is the source of the table in the link I provided) isn’t a simple analysis of regular income; it accounts for capital gains, AMT, estate, dividends, and carried interest, as well as expected changes in productivity and many other factors.
“But you’re not “anyone who objects to tax increases”. You’re someone for whom the tax rate is the only criterion by which a candidate or party should be judged.”
Yes, of course. That explains why I replied to Myca by saying that, no, not everyone does base their votes solely on tax decreases, me included. My first statement, while admittedly glib, certainly does not describe the entirety of my voting preference.
“The position you take, whether you mean it or not, forecloses any meaningful discussion on spending (both what on, and how much), on foreign policy, on, well just about anything that actually matters.”
No it doesn’t, because it is my position regarding spending. Specifically, I want less of it by the government and more of it by private citizens. Not that I would totally devalue the role of government in some things (schools, roads, police, as you mentioned), just that I don’t particularly believe, rather I am 100% certain, that these roles could be executed at far lower rates of taxation than what some of us pay now.
Daran, do you honestly think the workings of the government are so well-oiled that any discussion of relaxed taxation would cause the entire thing to just collapse? I doubt that you do.
“Except that the Tax Policy Center analysis (which is the source of the table in the link I provided) isn’t a simple analysis of regular income; it accounts for capital gains, AMT, estate, dividends, and carried interest, as well as expected changes in productivity and many other factors.”
Well then its totally bunk. There is no possible way that they could account for all of these widely variable factors and come up with any meaningful projections. No way. If someone makes 250K/year on only capital gains and dividends, there’s no way his tax rate will only go up 12 bucks with Obama.
They might come up with some nice means and the like, but the situation from person to person will more than likely not resemble that at all. In fact, I know mine wouldn’t. Even if it did, it doesn’t change my basic philosophy that less taxes = more productivity, with a few exceptions.
And so, since for the vast fucking majority of Americans, President Obama will mean less taxes, we can expect that you’ll be voting for him on that principle?
—Myca
Well then its totally bunk.
I’ll just take your word for it, then.
“Less taxes” means less overall money going to the government. It does not necessarily have to translate to taxes dropping a small amount for a large number of people – it could translate to taxes dropping a large amount for a small number of people.
By your standard, it’s “totally bunk” to say the average height of an adult woman is five feet 3.8 inches, since the majority of woman aren’t exactly that height, and a few exceptional women are 7 feet or 3 feet tall.
It’s an average. That doesn’t mean it matches every single person, but it also doesn’t mean it’s meaningless or “bunk.”
What’s funny is, first you objected because you (wrongly) thought it was a statement about simple income taxes, and didn’t take account of other factors. Once you were informed that in took into account a lot of factors, however, you switched to the entirely opposite view, and claimed that taking account of complex factors was objectionable.
Indeed, that is exactly what it means if someone says that people will pay less taxes under McCain, who plans to hugely lower taxes on the rich, while leaving them largely untouched on the middle class.
Obama, on the other hand, plans to lower taxes for 95% of Americans, while raising taxes on the richest 5%.
This is a bizarre interpretation, and one that makes the original statement almost certainly and obviously incorrect.
The standard argument is that ‘people will work harder if they’re taxed less’. I disagree with that. There’s no credible evidence for it, and quite a bit of evidence against (for more information, check out Jared Bernstein’s piece on the death of Trickle-Down Economics).
However, whether or not I disagree with it, 1) it’s the standard argument, and 2) it makes sense when applied to the original statement. It was this argument I was responding to . . . and since Barack Obama’s plan would mean lower taxes for 85+% of Americans, according to this argument it would mean higher productivity for 85+% of Americans.
Your statement seems to be based in the argument that “if the government has less money, productivity will go up,” which, frankly, is breathtakingly irrational.
—Myca
Government dollars are almost always less efficient than private dollars. I think the evidence of that is pretty much everywhere.
Or you could keep taxes flat for most people and lower them for wealthy people iff they invest more money in things that will make their employees more productive. Especially if those things are produced in the U.S. and thus leads to higher employment in the U.S.
Keeping money out of the hands of government is one of the most rational things I can think of. Especially considering how I see them spend it. I am again led to quote P.J. O’Rourke – “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
Less efficient at doing what? Making executives rich? Yes, they probably are. Building roads for public use? They most certainly are not.
“Evidence is pretty much everywhere” only if you ignore the limits and inefficiencies of corporate spending, while highlighting the limits and inefficiencies of government spending.
Yeah, I hear that a lot too, guys … but you know? That just takes you back to Daran’s comment in #9.
Keep on pumping the same old bullshit economics-ignorant tax rhetoric. Keep on saying that you’ll vote for whoever will lower taxes. Just don’t think that you’ll fool any of us into thinking that you mean anything other than, “I’ll vote for the Republican, no matter what happens with taxes.”
—Myca
That hasn’t happened once since the end of the WWII. Not once. This is a simple consequence of two facts:
1. No postwar Government after Truman’s has ever cut the Federal budget by a significant amount.
2. Every dollar spent is a dollar that must be raised in taxes.
If a politician promises to cut your taxes, look at his spending. If his tax cut isn’t matched by a corresponding reduction in spending, then he’s lying to you. You won’t end up paying less. You pay later.
And this is why, if you’re worried about the efficiency of the Government’s use of you money, you should forget about taxation, and look, as I said, at spending – how much and what on. Are the Bush Republicans, whose government has spent more than any other in history, which flew $8.8 billion in cash to Iraq and just lost it there, really the party of financial rectitude? Is spending trillions on a war against an enemy who hadn’t attacked you and was no threat, and thereby inflaming the hatred of a billion Muslims worldwide against your nation, really a good use of the $3 trillion or so you spent on it so far?
The right wing focus on “taxation, taxation, nothing but taxation” is simply voting for the politician who tells the biggest lie.
Except that being a plutocrat doesn’t mean you’re an elitist. Criticizing plutocracy means you’re a (cultural) elitist. A lot of money from some very rich people has been spent to establish this.
The use of “so” and “entire” are fairly obvious strawman markers. As opposed to it being partially well-oiled to the point that some of it would collapse?
No one has said that discussion of the merits of taxation would accomplish anything. We are talking about actual policy, in lieu of which, discuss away all you wish. If you’re giving away the “I’m being silenced” card this early in the game under a completely illogical circumstance… well, I can imagine you’re no ringer at poker.
No one has also said anything about the government collapsing. The government collapsing is but one of the many possible outcomes of bad policies such as Republican tax prescriptions, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the list.
For my part, I believe the government to be something like a shotgun. Try to kill flies with it and you’ll do a lot of collateral damage while most likely missing the fly. Use a flyswatter instead. On the other hand, come across a bear, and one shotgun will get you further than a million flyswatters. For small, everyday problems, big solutions are inefficient due to hamhandedness. For large scale problems, a mosaic of mini-solutions is inefficient due to coordination failure. Taking care of the elderly and educating the young are examples, both of which involve critical mass effects that’s harder to achieve without some collective organization. Eradicating poverty, I’d argue, is another, whose critical mass effect is that its mere existence reshapes society and the economy, and not in a good way. (I’m talking more of absolute rather than relative poverty, of course, though extreme relative poverty carries its own deleterious social effects.)
and the idea that Barack is some kind of plutocrat while the son and grandson of admirals, the husband of an heiress, is just an average fella — well, it’s simply ludicrous. And that’s bad news for McCain.
Understand that McCain is the son of someone who became an Admiral. But he was never an Admiral until McCain was out of college. His father was a Captain for most of that time, and IIUC McCain spent most of his youth living in (mostly crappy) military housing on (mostly crappy) low-level officers’ pay.
No, McCain isn’t an average fella. No Senator is. Nobody running for Senator is. For all his “aw shucks” mannner and Texas accent and unsophisticated style President Bush isn’t an “average fella” either. But there’s a difference between not being an average fella and being an elitist, someone who thinks that the elite class has a right and obligation to rule.
Less efficient at doing what? Making executives rich? Yes, they probably are. Building roads for public use? They most certainly are not.
How many examples do we have of private organizations building roads for public use do we have that we can test this proposition?
Actually, here in Illinois we are doing something like that. IIRC Mayor Daley essentially sold off (via a 99-year lease) the Chicago Skyway tollway to a private company. Chicago gets the lease payments and the private company gets the tolls and the headaches of operating and maintaining it. So we’ll see how that works out.
The Chicago Skyway being part of the Interstate system – 7.8 miles of I-90 from the Indiana state border to the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago (I-57). Don’t ask me how he swung that, Daley pretty much does WTF he wants to.
“What’s funny is, first you objected because you (wrongly) thought it was a statement about simple income taxes, and didn’t take account of other factors. Once you were informed that in took into account a lot of factors, however, you switched to the entirely opposite view, and claimed that taking account of complex factors was objectionable.”
It may have. I checked out the link and the Tax Policy Center’s site. I see that, yes, they do have some very rigorous analyses that take into account a wide variety of factors. But I have no idea whether or not that particular table used one of those analyses, although maybe I just overlooked the evidence.
I still think it’s both bunk and simplistic. Or bunk because it’s simplistic. You can’t boil down something so complex into an average. I mean, what’s a guy gotta do to at least get a median around here? The average is perhaps the most overly used and most meaningless statistic in existence, at least when presented in the absence of accompanying stats.
I have no objection to complex analyses. But I do when they are presented in oversimplified and, by extension, misleading formats.
OT – why can’t I seem to get italics, bold, and the like to work. What am I doing wrong?
“And so, since for the vast fucking majority of Americans, President Obama will mean less taxes, we can expect that you’ll be voting for him on that principle?”
No, because neither candidate has the right idea totally (lower everybody’s), so I pick the guy who lowers mine.
“If his tax cut isn’t matched by a corresponding reduction in spending, then he’s lying to you. You won’t end up paying less. You pay later.”
Which assumes that every dollar in legislatively spent monies is counterbalanced by one in legislatively guaranteed tax collections. Clearly this is not the case. In fact, the lower the legislatively guaranteed tax dollars, the higher the real-world tax revenues.
“The right wing focus on “taxation, taxation, nothing but taxation” is simply voting for the politician who tells the biggest lie.”
In some aggregates of the American economy, maybe, I don’t know. In this one, the ‘right-wing focus’ is completely correct. I’m in property management/contracting business. If taxes on, for instance, corporate capital gains, go up, OK. Fine. We just stop new construction and sales and shift capital into areas that show demonstrable losses, like rentals.
Functionally, Obama raises corporate capital gains, we show no capital gains. What happens on the ground is, instead of hiring contractors and subcontractors to build us houses and office buildings, we hire maintenance men for upkeep on already improved properties. It isn’t me who suffers, it’s the guy making 15 bucks an hour laying brick.
“How many examples do we have of private organizations building roads for public use do we have that we can test this proposition?”
Here’s one, RonF
You’ll be able to recognize it as soon as you hit it. It’ll be the one with no potholes or construction hangups.
“By your standard, it’s “totally bunk” to say the average height of an adult woman is five feet 3.8 inches, since the majority of woman aren’t exactly that height, and a few exceptional women are 7 feet or 3 feet tall.”
And by your standard, a country of 10 people in which 9 make 1 dollar per year and one makes 100 million per year is a pretty rich country.
See? They’re so bad at it, they know not to even try.
Of course, it’s an unfair comparison. They’re not going to even attempt it, because there’s no incentive for them to do it — they’re in it for the profit, and there’s no profit to be had. (Toll roads aside; that’s what I meant by “public use”. Perhaps I should have said “free use” instead.)
Governments are really, really good at some things, and it’s dishonest to selectively ignore those things when you’re comparing public vs. private efficiency.
So, although (by your reckoning) Obama’s tax plan would increase productivity for 85-95% of Americans, you put a measly twelve bucks ahead of that?
That’s awesome. That’s patriotic. Way to put the country first.
—Myca
Here’s the thing about Obama’s promise to lower taxes: I flat out don’t believe he has the political clout even if elected to bend a Democrat-controlled Congress that far, and I doubt he believes it himself. If he does manage to do it, great, but if he doesn’t, his out is blaming Congress.
Further, I think cleaning up Bush’s mess will be far too expensive not to raise taxes.
McCain would also have the same problems.
(Toll roads aside; that’s what I meant by “public use”. Perhaps I should have said “free use” instead.)
Well, but that changes the entire proposition. After all, governments build toll roads. If governments are building roads that they directly charge you to use, why not let private companies do so and see if they can do it cheaper/better?
At the start of American history there were many private toll roads. We got away from that when we started building public free roads, and that’s fine – it’s a defined function of our governmental system that the government builds and maintains roads, for good reason. But once you bring toll roads back into consideration, why should they have to be public?
In at least two instances as we can see up thread, there are at least two governments that have said “Gee, they don’t”.
Here in Illinois our toll roads were originally set up that way so that the tolls would pay off the bonds that were sold to finance construction. The voters were promised that once the bonds were paid off the roads would become freeways. That turned out to be a blatant lie, of course. Once politicians get a revenue stream they don’t let go. Those bonds were paid off long ago. So I tend not to trust Illinois politicians, no matter what office they are running for.
Yeah, jed, but then when we elected a Republican Congress they didn’t do squat for reducing government spending either. The American public thought they were electing a conservative Congress; instead, they got a Republican one. Just goes to show; when you walk into a whorehouse it doesn’t really matter which side of the aisle you turn to, you’re still going to get f**ked.
But why did they think that? When has a Republican government ever spent less that the governments that came before them?
G. H. Bush spent more than Reagan did. Reagan spent more than Carter did. Ford spent more than Nixon who spent more than Johnson did. Eisenhower spent more than Truman.
And now we’re shocked, shocked I say, that G. W. Bush is spending more than Clinton did.
Just found this: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/miot-slt082808.php
But why did they think that?
Why? Because a group of new Congressmen led by Newt Gingrich all claimed that they were the real thing and that they were going to do business in a different fashion, and people believed them. Now, I don’t know what happened next. Did they all simply lie? Or did they get co-opted into the system? I’ll let the scholars sort that out.
Bush spent? Carter spent? Seems to me that “Congress spent” would be more appropriate. That’s where the spending bills come from. Sure, the President can refuse to sign a bill or even veto it, but you can only run the country on continuing resolutions for so long. At some point if the Congress doesn’t vote up lower spending the President is going to sign the bill he gets.
I’m not shocked. I am pissed, though.
Although it’s a little hard to make out what you’re saying, this sounds like you’re claiming that lowering taxes leads to higher tax revenues. But that’s simply not true. From factcheck.org:
(There’s a more in-depth discussion here, but factcheck has the advantage of being non-partisan.)
Greg Mankiw is only one of a slew of Bush administration economists who have said that tax cuts do not pay for themselves. This is in contrast to Republican politicians, who frequently promise that there are no trade-offs for tax cuts, and in contrast to conservative publications, who forbid their writers from dissenting from the “free lunch” view of tax cuts.
Matt Yglesias said “There’s a systematic effort by the right to convince people that tax cuts are not merely beneficial in some ways or beneficial all things considered but that there are actually no tradeoffs whatsoever.” That’s a pretty good description of the “tax cuts increase revenues!” nonsense. In the real world, tax cuts — like everything else — come with costs.
The question is, is the mean extremely far from the median? Put another way, is the average case ridiculously distant from the typical case?
In the example you mention — the case of the average income in a bar of typical Americans plus Bill Gates — the average is so far removed from the median as to be useless. But there’s no reason to think that’s the case regarding the Tax Policy Center analysis. For one thing, the TPC analysis was done in quintiles, which means that it’s never the case that Bill Gates’ income is averaged with someone making $20,000 a year.
You do come up with an example of how the TPC analysis might not apply — “If someone makes 250K/year on only capital gains and dividends, there’s no way his tax rate will only go up 12 bucks with Obama.” But that’s an extremely atypical case; the vast majority of Americans do not get 100% of their income from capital gains and dividends. Most Americans get most of their incomes from working at jobs; and the TPC analysis should apply well to that.
A bigger problem for the TPC analysis is that all they can do is calculate based on what the candidates and their staffs say; but how much will the real world resemble what’s being proposed here?
Unlike Jed, I do think there’s a difference between the candidates — I think Obama has a much better shot at getting a lot of his proposals through a Democratic congress than McCain does, for obvious partisan reasons.
I am currently banned from the site.
From the viewpoint of “What can we do to keep it from happening again?”, yes, it matters.
I don’t know how much Congress actually spends itself, compared with what it appropriates for the Government.
The point is that the executive cannot collect what the legislature does not levy and it cannot spend what the legislature does not appropriate. So if the legislature actually cares to limit what’s collected and spent, it can do so.
“Saying “The 109th Congress spent more than the 108th Congress…” wouldn’t have had the same impact.”
Have the same impact? What impact are you trying to have? Blame the country’s ills on whatever executive administration is in power, or assess the blame where it belongs?
For one, I doubt that many people would be able to associate a particular Congress with the Party in power.
For past history, you’re likely correct. But people are generally aware of the identity of the party currently in control.
Bush spent? Carter spent? Seems to me that “Congress spent” would be more appropriate. That’s where the spending bills come from. Sure, the President can refuse to sign a bill or even veto it, but you can only run the country on continuing resolutions for so long. At some point if the Congress doesn’t vote up lower spending the President is going to sign the bill he gets.
That’s technically accurate. US Const, Art 1, Sec. 7, 8. However, the vast majority of spending corresponds with the Executive’s budget. Reagan campaigned on reversing Carter’s “catastrophic” deficits, and later chastised Congress for spending too much, but the (then unprecedented) deficits that Reagan rang up corresponded very closely with the budgets Reagan submitted.
This pattern has been followed for every Republican administration since. For a discussion of federal tax and spending practices since 1938, and whether Congress or the Executive is more responsible, look here. Here’s a brief excerpt:
(For what it’s worth, I would use the term “supply-side” where the author uses the term “neo-conservative.”)
Hey, just out of curiosity umpteen years later, did Obama end up lowering taxes for people making less than $112,000 per year?
Yes.
By jove I think you’re right.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/10/everything-obama-has-done-and-wants-to-do-on-taxes-in-one-post/