During the campaign, Barack Obama was unequivocal: If your family makes less than $250,000 a year, he promised, your taxes would not be raised, no matter how many new health care reforms or stimulus packages his White House devises. Here's what he said, part of his stock campaign speech:
"I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
Summers, an ambitious pol said to be salivating over the prospect of becoming the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, was asked on CBS' "Face the Nation" if even the middle class could face higher taxes under the president's ambitious healthcare overhaul.
"There's a lot that could happen over time," he said sounding like an oracle. "It's never a good idea to absolutely rule things, rule things out, no matter what."
As for Geithner, you may recall that he had his own back-taxes issue, something about unpaid Social Security taxes that almost derailed his confirmation. Asked on ABC's "This Week" about runaway government spending, the Treasury secretary said obliquely, "We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically. ... That's going to require some very hard choices."
Charitably, Team Obama might have been floating the idea merely to measure the political fallout. Or perhaps a tax hike is inevitable. As the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation put it, you can’t borrow a trillion dollars for an economic stimulus, enact a new trillion-dollar healthcare entitlement and increase federal spending by 12% without raising taxes on the middle class. "Eventually the moment comes when reality catches up to campaigning," the foundation said. "That moment is fast approaching."
Let us know what you think. And in the meantime watch the president's lips. If it was a trial balloon he'll probably rein it in soon. And if not, watch your wallet.
Times columnist Chris Erskine, who has been known to wax poetic about sports and the life of a suburban dad (both Erskine specialties), decided to take in an anti-tax Tea Party the other day. As the Ticket has reported, people all over the country have attended them. Erskine writes:
You might have caught wind of this tea party movement, sometimes dubbed TEA (Taxed Enough Already). It first appeared in late February, with scattered protests around the nation, then grew to a reported 500 events on tax day, April 15. The grass-roots movement has sort of taken off, becoming more than a hiccup and less than a full-fledged revolt.
There were some 1,400 tea party rallies scheduled across the nation this Independence Day weekend, billed as nonpartisan efforts to rein in tax-and-spend politicians. Significant? You be the judge. Honestly, I could come down two different ways on all of this: In times so tough, isn’t it a little cold-hearted to complain about paying your fair share? Or, are people so fed up with dishing out huge chunks of their income — and receiving so little visible benefit — that they think their “fair share” isn’t so fair anymore?
Erskine goes on to describe what transpires when anti-tax crusaders rallied recently in suburban Los Angeles.
If you’ve never been to an anti-tax tea party, here’s the deal. There are a lot of good Americans — about 500 at this rally — sitting around a stage in molded plastic chairs trying to stay awake. Tea is in short supply, and oddly, there is no beer (Huey Long would’ve sent an entire Budweiser truck). But the burgers are good, and the music — some live, some recorded — is stirring.
What more does a political rally need? A few characters.
To read about those characters, click here for his whole column. In typical Erskine fashion, he blends humor (“Have you looked at a dollar bill lately? George Washington is weeping”) with on-point portraits of people being themselves. You might find them admirable, or appalling, and maybe even a little bit of both at once.
Last month's "tea party" protests have come and gone but are not forgotten. New protests are already brewing, some maybe this holiday weekend, others probably for July 4, with txt msgs and tweets flying back and forth.
The phenomenon in many ways is familiar in American political history -- a kind of eruption, an incoherent lashing out by people angry over taxes and spending and big government and bigger spending. And the uncertainty of their current lives.
Contrary to some cable news channels, we found "tea party" protesters often to be just as angry at Republicans in general and George W. Bush in particular as at the awe-inspiring size of the Obama Democratic administration's spending plans.
Historically, these protests have fizzled without some political personality to coalesce around -- a Gene McCarthy, a John Anderson, a George Wallace. A Ron Paul even.
Our Times colleague Richard Fausset spent a good deal of time recently with "tea party" participants. And we asked him to go through his notes and thoughts and share the experiences with us. Here's what he told us:
The people I talked with had a variety of targets. This doesn’t mean they went easy on Obama, however. One fake campaign sign showed a picture of the president and...
At the rate New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending his own money in the current re-election campaign, he's likely to end up with only about $16,410,400,000 left to his name.
But that just shows to go you the kind of sacrifice that some public servants are willing to make in order to serve the people who elect them.
In the latest 60-day campaign finance reports, multi-billionaire Bloomberg reveals that he's spending a little more than a quarter-million dollars per day to purchase a third term in Gotham's City Hall.
That's about twice the rate he'd spent at this point four years ago in his previous mayoral campaign, which cost him $85 million by the end and produced a landslide victory.
The municipal approval rating for the ex-Democrat, ex-Republican, current independent has only hovered in the 60s.
Bloomberg is in such a tight municipal race that he's heading down to the University of Pennsylvania tonight to give tomorrow's commencement address. That's how worried he is.
As long as he reports it, Bloomberg can spend as much of his personal fortune as he likes. Scores of millions. A hundred million. Or more. Completely up to him.
And the little guy doesn't even have an actual opponent yet.
Other than that he's in deep silt.
But before anyone jumps to the conclusion that the world's 17th richest man, according to Forbes, can get re-elected to try to run the nation's largest city just because he has a bargeload of $10,000 bills, consider this:
Once Bloomberg decided he very much enjoyed the high-profile job and would really like to have a third term, he had to convince the City Council to change the law banning a third consecutive mayoral term.
Once that happened, most of the potential candidates who thought the mayor's throne would be vacated this year began whistling and walking away.
Any possible opponents now seem in disarray. They have to raise money the old-fashioned way -- begging.
Bloomberg's stash simplifies everything. He does none of that. Easier just to write his own checks. Day after day. Week after week. A quarter-million here. A quarter-million there.
Sure, New York City taxes have gone up during his reign. Yes, critics note, unemployment's up too. And, OK, homelessness as well. Schools are crowded. But since when is any of that a rich mayor's fault? There's no real mention of those troubles in Bloomberg's massive advertising campaign.
So why should anyone else be bothered?
Anyway, anyone who's ever under-tipped a New Yorker knows those folks don't really care about money there.
-- Andrew Malcolm
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Photos credits: Ronan Robert / Flickr (top); city of New York
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is having a difficult year, what with multibillion-dollar state deficits, challenging budget negotiations (see photo above) and a foundering ballot measure campaign for next week's vote.
Now add to the mix a new petition to recall him from office, approved Friday by Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The recall petition is the second currently circulating to take the governor out of the California Capitol by the same door he came in
Most recall efforts prove unsuccessful. But ask Democratic ex-Gov. Gray Davis if they all do.
The new petition’s main proponent is John D. Fusek of La Habra, representing a group calling itself Taxpayers United to Recall Governor Schwarzenegger (TURGS). It has until Oct. 22 to gather 1 million valid signatures in order to qualify for the ballot.
According to the petition,
The governor promised to reduce state spending and reform state government. Instead, he increased spending by over 40%, benefiting public sector unions and special interests, at the expense of taxpayers ….
The governor promised to help encourage job creation by reducing costly regulation. Instead he passed more job-killing mandates that are destroying California jobs and opportunity. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger must be held accountable for worsening the lives of California taxpayers, voters and families.
A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman, Julie Soderlund, declined to comment.
Ron Paul is -- or was -- an ob-gyn doctor. So he should know, right? And he says all this swine flu H2ON9 or whatever scary flu talk is, well, just that -- scare talk. Just another facet of an ongoing plot by the federal government to frighten the public and assume more control over the lives of Americans.
In a regular video report to supporters (see below), the 11-term libertarian-like Texas Republican congressman says simply: "The government shouldn't be in the medical business."
He describes a similar outbreak of swine flu back in 1976 when Democrat Joe Biden was already a senator but Barack Obama was just a teenager. Paul says he was one of two votes against federal involvement in flu-fighting back then.
"There was a panic," he recalls, "and they said it was going to sweep the nation and the government came up with some flu shots and the government was going to inoculate everybody and save the world from this disaster."
According to Paul, one person died in the swine flu outbreak that year while more than 25 died as a result of bad reactions to the flu shots. Which sounds like scary stuff to those of us sneezing into our bent arms and compulsively washing our hands this morning. By late today word of mouth and exaggerated e-mails will have the number of those 1976 deaths up to 250 or worse.
Not to mention the secret highway being planned from Mexico across Texas to connect with Canada. But that's another conspiracy.
"Here we are once again," Paul says, "swine flu coming up and everybody's panicking. It's practically like we've been attacked by nuclear weapons. I mean, press conferences on the weekend! And how did the Department of Homeland Security get into the medical business?"
Paul, who's even older than another unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate John McCain, paints the outbreak of panic over the outbreak of flu as another bid by the new Democratic administration to grow government unnecessarily. He has more to say in the video below.
"The big question," the shirt-sleeved Grandpa Paul lectures, "is, does bigger government always solve these problems? It usually makes them much worse."
Which is, of course, a totally ridiculous assertion. Look at how well the federal government handled the Hurricane Katrina aftermath.
There's a wondrously simple U.S. economic recovery plan bouncing its way all over the Internet this week to fix the recession, end unemployment, boost the banks, refinance the automobile industry and repair the housing crisis all in one bold stroke -- and at a fraction of the cost of the Obama administration's complex, grandiose and costly government spending plans.
Of course, this new idea plopping into and flashing out of thousands of excited e-mailboxes all over would never work politically because it wasn't designed in Washington like, say, the tax code and therefore is quite simple. Nor would it grow the size of the federal government, which would be unacceptable to many in the federal government.
Here's the idea and the math as devised by a devilishly clever, now anonymous Internet author:
Take the 40 million or so American workers over age 50 and give them each $1 million tax-free. Yup, just put that money into private hands. This seems like a wonderful idea to those whose hands are over age 50. But, of course, there's a catch. Three catches, actually.
1) Everyone receiving $1 million must immediately quit their current job. Overnight, that opens up 40 million new positions, which takes care of unemployment and is something like 11 times better than the number of jobs the president has promised to create through government during the next couple of years.
2) Everyone receiving $1 million would have to buy a new car, preferably American-made. Forty million new cars means an awful lot of jobs all across the nation's automobile industry and ....
While you were sleeping, we were reading and writing:
Suppose B.O. picks up after Bo?
Sounds like Barney, the dog of George W. Bush's, has got the former president trained on the most important duty of a dog-walker in an urban neighborhood.
Hint: It involves a little plastic bag.
Bush was in China this weekend, making another of his paid appearances that started a few weeks ago in Calgary. The retired Republican continues his refusal to criticize his successor, a courtesy that his Democratic successor has not felt obliged to reciprocate.
Bush will only say Barack Obama "was not my first choice."
The 43rd president said that soon after after settling into his newly-acquired north Dallas home, anticipating the new baseball season, he plopped down on the couch and said, "Free at last." Laura Bush, he said, then added, "Free to do the dishes."
More importantly, Bush talked about his simple pleasure of casually walking Barney around the Preston Hollow neighborhood, and noted that he dutifully carries the urban dog owner's required plastic bag for removing the dog's duty. Bush then added, "It occurred to me I was picking up what I had been dodging for eight years."
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A Reagan opposes California's governor
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of the late president and California governor Ronald Reagan, has joined the anti-big government Tea Party movement. Another Republican splitting with GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger over his spending and taxing policies.
If there's one thing that the folks who work and spend so hard to get to Washington don't like, regardless of their profession or political persuasion, it's thinking that they don't run or know all things in this country from their perch down in that ex-swamp that Maryland gave away as useless.
So, much of the commentary emanating from Washington and its self-important sister city of New York on last week's several hundred tea parties was how they were so well-organized by unorganized, leaderless Republicans desperate for anything to oppose the awesomely popular President Obama.
From working our local sources, reading comments and blogs and exchanging Tweets with many Ticket followers, the tea parties struck us much the same as the Ron Paul movement of 2007-08, a semi-spontaneous grass-roots eruption of emotion, unease, anger, inchoate thoughts, coherent arguments, cultural variations and anti-big-government sentiments with the main targets of spending and taxes by big government, in that order.
To the extent that elected Republican politicians were involved, they seemed to be kinda out of shape trying to catch up and join in. And that noted GOP member George W. Bush wasn't coming off too well in the criticisms either, primarily for his immense late-term spending. Later, expanded greatly by No. 44.
One of the more interesting things to watch in coming months is what the staying power of these protests is; many messages are already flying around about organizing similar parties on July 4. We'll see.
If the protests do last, they could well become factors for politicians on all sides to work into their electoral equations for the 2010 campaigns right around this time next year.
So, as an experiment we asked one of our loyal Ticket readers and Twitter followers, Dann Selle up in Spokane, Wash., to keep some notes for us to share with Ticket readers around the world.
His full report is below. And he sent us a video clip below too. Let us know what you think.
Spokane Tea Party is a non-profit, non-political grassroots effort with a mission to create public awareness of the practices of past and current career politicians in Washington D.C.
Our volunteers are just ordinary small business owners, deeply concerned citizens, mothers and fathers and, grandparents expressing anger at the government for taking hard-earned dollars out of their pockets and giving it to failed mortgages of others and to major corporations. They do not believe this is the role of our government and flies in the face of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Spokane Tea Party was founded by Gary Edgington and partner Kirk Smith approximately 5 weeks ago. A Spokane Tea Party web page was started at www.spokaneteaparty.org. A massive media blitz was started about two weeks prior to the scheduled event News Releases were sent out to all newspapers, TVs, and Radio stations within a 100 mile area.
Local talk show hosts Mike Fitzsimmons on KXLY radio, Spokane, WA. in addition, Dr. Laurie Roth, a nationally syndicated host on KSBN radio, Spokane, hosted Gary Edgington two times each respectively.
Dann Selle dug into his own pocket and cut a public service announcement airing on KQNT news radio in Spokane that aired 15 times in a three-day period around the Dean and Angela news program and Rush Limbaugh. KHQ television interviewed Media rep., Dann Selle on the eve of the event, near the chosen location. Selle stated the organization expected at least 1,000 to 1,500 people to show up.
At 3pm on April 15, people began filing in, near the Convention Center and Opera House. By 4:15pm, approximately 2,500 to 3,000 had arrived standing shoulder to shoulder.
By 4:45p.m. over 5,000 were officially estimated present. Thousands were carrying signs, banners and flags expressing there grievances to both Republican and Democrat national representation in Congress.
Edgington worked the crowd and directed them to come closer to the stage to make more room while, Kirk Smithcontinued signing up people for event news, and he underestimated the crowd and was concerned he might run out of sign up sheets. Later, Edgington spoke giving thanks to all who made the event possible. *bright sunny day etc……
Cathy McMorris Rogers, Washington’s 5th district U.S. representative spoke very briefly before the 5,000 plus attendees. She simply said she was not there for speeches and this was not about her. She was there as a citizen like everyone else. She was there to say thank you to Spokane for the turn-out and would continue the fight against government spending in D.C. She left the stage after about 1½ minutes and joined the crowd. *She was a class act .
*Other speakers where lay people with no reference to party affiliation expressing their heartfelt concerns over the massive U. S. debt…. “We the People will pay for it with higher and higher taxation.” “It will not stop there; our children and grandchildren will pay for the next 40 years for what congress has done in less than 40 days.”
People further expressed anger that “taxation would rival the amount they have lost in their 401k's over a ten-year period doubling losses.” People milled around for an hour after the party closed at 6:00pm sharing and discussing other concerns about US Gov.
*Many car companies have folded over the years and we still have plenty to choose from." ###
Photo credits: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times (Anti-spending protesters assemble in Santa Ana, Calif.); Al Grillo / Associated Press (Alaskans protest big government on Anchorage street); Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times; Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times (A Los Angeles protester). .
Here, through the magic of technology, are the remarks of President Obama, who wasn't in Washington Friday but somehow still sent these weekly words from the White House, which the Ticket always obediently publishes early every Saturday morning.
This week the GOP remarks are from a California Republican -- yes, there still are some left. He's Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield. His words are included below. (Relax, last week the GOP came first.)
-- Andrew Malcolm
President Obama:
It’s not news to say that we are living through challenging times: The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. A credit crisis that has made that downturn worse. And a fiscal disaster that has accumulated over a period of years.
In the year 2000, we had projected budget surpluses in the trillions, and Washington appeared to be on the road to fiscal stability. Eight years later, when I walked in the door, the projected budget deficit for this year alone was $1.3 trillion. And in order to jumpstart our struggling economy, we were forced to make investments that added to that deficit through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
But as surely as our future depends on building a new energy economy, controlling healthcare costs and ensuring that our kids are once again the best educated in the world, it also depends on restoring a sense of responsibility and accountability to our federal budget. Without significant change to steer away from ever-expanding deficits and debt, we are on an unsustainable course.
So today, we simply cannot afford to perpetuate a system in Washington where politicians and bureaucrats make decisions behind closed doors, with little accountability for the consequences; where billions are squandered on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a lobbyist or interest group; and where outdated technology and information systems undermine efficiency, threaten our security, and fail to serve an engaged citizenry.
If we’re to going to rebuild our economy on a solid foundation, we need to change the....
