Inside Politics

TAXING THE POOR

” ‘I can make a firm pledge … no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.’ Remember that? It was Barack Obama, campaigning to become president last Sept. 12 in Dover, N.H.,”Brad Schiller wrote Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal.

Indeed, he promised repeatedly that 95 percent of American families would get a tax cut. So it’s especially fitting that he chose April Fools Day to implement his first tax increase - which will fall mostly on individuals and families who do not make anywhere near $250,000 per year,” said Mr. Schiller, a professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and author of “The Economy Today.”

“Early in February, the president signed a law to triple the federal excise tax on cigarettes - which will jump from 39 cents per pack to $1.01 today. His administration projects this tax increase will bring in at least $38 billion over the next five years.

“If you don’t smoke, maybe you don’t care. Maybe you even think a higher ‘sin tax’ is a good thing. But health issues aren’t the only concern here. There are also questions of fairness, federalism, macroeconomic impact and crime.

“The fairness issue is particularly troubling. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only one in five Americans smokes, so the excise targets a minority - and over half of all smokers are low income, and one of four are officially classified as poor.

“Mr. Obama prefers to tout his tax cuts for low-income households. But his ‘stimulative’ Make Work Pay tax cut gets dribbled out at $8-$10 a week. A pack-a-day smoker will pay half of that back in higher cigarette taxes. Smokers getting welfare, unemployment or disability checks instead of paychecks won’t get as much in tax cuts, but they will still pay the whole cigarette tax increase. Anyone concerned about widening income inequality should have second thoughts about this distribution of the tax burden.”

HOLDER’S POLITICS

”The nomination of hard-left crusader Dawn Johnsen to lead the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the department’s top legal adviser, is stalled in the Senate. No matter. Attorney General Eric Holder has simply taken the job of politicizing DOJ to reflect the Democrats’ partisan agenda into his own hands,” Andy McCarthy writes in a blog at National Review Online (www.national review.com).

”The Washington Post reports [Wednesday] that Holder has overruled OLC’s objective, well-reasoned, constitutionally rooted opinion that the controversial D.C. voting-rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional. OLC’s conclusion, if accepted by the attorney general, as is customary, would likely have doomed passage of the measure, which is strongly favored by President Obama and Democrats,” Mr. McCarthy said.

“The bill would give the District of Columbia representation in Congress, specifically one member of the House of Representatives - and, that accomplished, the way would be paved to add two Senate seats down the line. As the District is small and heavily Democrat, this would pull the Congress deeper into Democrat control.

“But the problem is that the Constitution clearly forbids the scheme. It expressly provides, in Article I, Section 2, ‘The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States.’ The District of Columbia is not a State. It is thus ineligible for representation in the House. (By the way, Art. I, Sec. 3, similarly provides that senators shall come ‘from each State, elected by the people thereof.’)”

MAGIC DUST

”Someone tore up the script,” London Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes.

”Here’s how it was meant to go. Barack Obama was supposed to sweep into Europe on his first major trip abroad as the new JFK, greeted by adoring fans moistly waving little American flags. His progress would be part celebrity world tour, part celebration of the end of the Bush era. A needy Gordon Brown would bask in the Obama glow, hoping its rays would improve his own deathly pallor. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s leaders would fall to their knees, humbly agreeing to any request made by the visiting emperor, mindful that in a choice between them and Obama, their own electorates would choose Obama every time,” Mr. Freedland said.

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