Obama-nochio Lies About Taxes

There are good liars and bad liars. Good liars know the right moment to "enhance" a story to make everything tilt in their favor. Done properly, such lies are undetectable and unverifiable. Bad liars just spit out what they want you to believe, whether it makes sense or not. Obama is a bad liar, as his most recent interview with Bill O'Reilly proved.

What did Obama lie about? Right in the middle of his interview, Obama spat out this doozy:

“I didn’t raise taxes once. I lowered taxes over the last two years. I lowered taxes for the last two years.”

Oh really? See, the problem with this kind of lie is that it can be verified, as indeed I have done. As you may have guessed, his claim that he didn't raise taxes turns out to be a $1.5 trillion lie. Take a look at the taxes Obama raised over the past two years:

On individual income. . . .

● $179 billion. . . elimination of itemized deductions on people making more than $250,000
● $118 billion. . . capital gains tax hike on people making more than $250,000

On business. . . .

● $5.3 billion. . . excise tax on Gulf of Mexico oil and gas
● $17 billion. . . reinstatement of superfund taxes
● $24 billion. . . new tax on carried-interest as income
● $5 billion. . . codification of the “economic substance doctrine”
● $61 billion. . . repeal LIFO
● $210 billion. . . international tax changes
● $4 billion. . . information reporting changes on rental payments
● $62 million. . . repeal deduction for tertiary injectants
● $49 million. . . repeal passive loss exception for interests in oil/natural gas properties
● $13 billion. . . repeal manufacturing tax deduction for oil/natural gas companies
● $1 billion. . . increase amortization period for independent producers
● $882 million. . . eliminate advanced earned income tax credit
● $?. . . $0.62 cents per pack tax on tobacco

Under ObamaCare. . .

● $15 billion. . . individual mandates under ObamaCare
● $28 billion. . . employer mandates under ObamaCare
● $149.1 billion. . . 40% excise tax on “Cadillac” health plans
● $1.3 billion. . . additional 10% charge on early withdrawal from HSAs
● $5 billion. . . end use of HSAs and FSAs for non-prescription medicines
● $13.3 billion. . . cap on FSAs
● $86.8 billion. . . 0.9% hike in payroll taxes for Medicare
● $17.1 billion. . . new 1099 reporting requirements
● $22.2 billion. . . tax on drug companies
● $19.2 billion. . . tax on medical device makers
● $10 billion. . . tax on health insurers
● $5.8 billion. . . excise tax on elective cosmetic surgery
● $2.7 billion. . . tanning tax
● $15.2 billion. . . raising itemized medical deduction from 7.5% of 10% of AGI
● $5.4 billion. . . elimination of deduction for employer-provided retirement prescription drug coverage
● $600 million. . . $500,000 compensation limit for health insurance executives
● $400 million. . . elimination of tax deduction for Blue Cross/Blue Shield
● $?. . . $50,000 tax per hospital that fails to meet HHS rules

And lets not forget that he proposed even more than he got, like:

● $338 billion. . . Bush tax cuts expire for people making more than $250,000

These total at least $1.484 trillion in tax hikes (over 10 years). And lest you think these numbers are the mad ravings of some conservative crackpot, the source for the non-ObamaCare tax hikes was ABC News. The source for the ObamaCare tax hikes was the President’s own Office of Management and Budget.

So how do we account for this whopper? I mean, this seems a little blatant doesn’t it? Here’s the trick: what Obama is doing is he’s offsetting tax increases with tax cuts to make the claim that overall he hasn’t raised taxes. He just carefully avoids telling you that he’s talking about an offset. Instead, he tries to sneak that past you with an ambiguous use of the word "taxes" -- which he uses both in the sense of specific identifiable taxes (i.e. how he wants you to hear it) and as "taxes overall" (i.e. how he actually means it). This careful use has caused some to claim that Obama's lie was premeditated, which appears to be a strong possibility.

Yet, even if we accept Obama's unspoken claim of "net taxes," there is still another problem. This is where Obama’s repeated mention of the two year mark becomes important -- the tax cuts expire at the two year mark. Thus, even under his formulation, he could not make the same claim from the third year onward. Indeed, as Grover Norquist explains it: “Ninety percent of all the tax cuts he ever signed into law are temporary, but 100 percent of all of the tax increases he passed are permanent.”

Finally, just for fun, let’s pretend we’re Keynesians. Keynes believed that every dollar you add to an economy (or remove from it) gets multiplied by five as it passes through the economy. If that’s true, then Obama’s tax hikes will hurt the economy in the amount of $7.42 trillion over ten years, or $742 billion a year. According to Obama, his $789 billion stimulus should have created 3 million jobs. . . though we know how that turned out. So what do you think a $742 billion yearly tax hike will do to jobs?

Yeah, that was my guess too.

So what are your favorite Obama/Democratic lies?