In his address last night President Obama repeated his familiar bleat about “shared sacrifice.”
His approach, the president claimed, a “balanced approach,”
asks everyone to give a little without requiring anyone to sacrifice too much….
This approach is also bipartisan. While many in my own party aren’t happy with the painful cuts it makes, enough will be willing to accept them if the burden is fairly shared….
What we’re talking about under a balanced approach is asking Americans whose incomes have gone up the most over the last decade – millionaires and billionaires – to share in the sacrifice everyone else has to make.
And who do you think opposes all this proposed fairness?
The only reason this balanced approach isn’t on its way to becoming law right now is because a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a cuts-only approach – an approach that doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to contribute anything at all. And because nothing is asked of those at the top of the income scales, such an approach would close the deficit only with more severe cuts to programs we all care about….
If I were in a charitable mood I would say these comments were odd, coming as they did from someone widely believed to be smart. Less charitably but more accurately, they were nothing more than partisan claptrap that at no point crossed paths with the truth.
If Obama truly believed in “shared sacrifice,” wouldn’t he ask those whom CBS News describes as the “astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans [who] now pay zero or negative federal income taxes” to contribute at least something?
According to The Tax Foundation, quoting IRS data, the richest 5% of taxpayers paid just under 60% of all federal income taxes (the bottom 50%, by contrast, paid 2.7%).
According to Obama, however, the 60% of all income taxes paid by the top 5% — whom Obama describes as “millionaires and billionaires” but whom the IRS identifies as those making over $159,619 — somehow means they don’t “contribute anything at all.” And his “balanced approach” that purportedly “asks everyone to give a little” somehow still avoids asking the “astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans [who] now pay zero or negative federal income taxes” to give anything at all.
Fair and balanced Obama is not.
