The Associated Press and the Washington Post have begun fact-checking President Obama’s speech yesterday. They essentially demolish the claims of the president.
According to the AP, for example:
President Barack Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries. The data say they already are.
“Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it,” Obama said as he announced his deficit-reduction plan this week. “It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million.”
On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.
The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
And here’s the Post:
Independent budget experts said the blueprint that Obama unveiled Monday — which White House officials say would save more than $4 trillion when added to earlier budget deals this year — appears to fall short of his target. The plan also relies on an array of well-worn budget ploys that do little to advance the cause of bipartisan cooperation in taming the nation’s spiraling debt, the experts said… The latest Obama plan “doesn’t produce any more in realistic savings than the plan they offered in April,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “They’ve filled in details, repackaged it and replaced one gimmick with another. They don’t even stabilize the debt. This is just not enough.”
The most disheartening development, MacGuineas and others said, is Obama’s decision to count $1.1 trillion in savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan toward his debt-reduction total. Because Obama has no intention of continuing war spending at last year’s elevated levels, that $1.1 trillion would never have been spent.
How inconvenient.
More fact-checking will follow. More false claims and distortions will be revealed. And the credibility of Obama will continue to crumble.
It’s difficult enough to run for president as a liberal committed to stoking the embers of class resentment. It’s doubly hard when the facts you cite are so obviously and transparently invented.
I’m not quite sure why David Axelrod and David Plouffe want Obama to run as a post-modern liberal whose claims can’t be trusted. I for one rather doubt America is turning its lonely eyes to Jacques Derrida. But maybe the Obama campaign thinks it has no other option.
