Republican candidates and taxes
Think Progress carries quotes from the Presidential contenders and election slogans
The release of this plan immediately spurred the natural Republican tax apoplexy, with the GOP presidential candidates decrying tax increases as a surefire way to destroy jobs:
MITT ROMNEY: President Obama’s plan to raise taxes will have a crushing impact on economic growth. Higher taxes mean fewer jobs – it’s that simple. This is yet another indication that President Obama has no clue how to bring our economy back.
RICK PERRY: President Obama’s plan is a bait and switch that offers more than a trillion dollars in higher taxes for a promise of temporary tax relief…Worst of all, the Obama plan fails to provide the certainty employers need to create jobs.
MICHELE BACHMANN: Mr. President – you don’t create jobs by increasing taxes on job creators. The President’s plan to raise taxes on the American people is the wrong policy to create economic growth and jobs and shows he doesn’t understand how to turn our economy around…If Warren Buffett believes he doesn’t pay enough taxes, then he should write a check today to the Treasury, but he and the President shouldn’t enact warfare on the millions of small businesses, on charities and on middle class America with increased tax burdens.RON PAUL:[W]hen the President starts targeting the so-called rich, he’s really targeting small business owners, so ultimately he’s threatening the little guy. The President’s plan, then, will result in a fatal broadside to the national economy from Main Street on down….A $1.5 trillion tax hike will do nothing to help us out of this mess we’re in, and will more than likely create more problems, lead to less investment, and cause more job loss at a time when Americans of all kinds are hurting.
JON HUNTSMAN: President Obama continues to demonstrate that he has no new ideas on how to create American jobs. For two and a half years he’s been peddling a version of the Buffett Tax Hike as a key pillar of his failed attempt to tax and spend and regulate this country to prosperity. That simply hasn’t worked and it won’t work now.
HERMAN CAIN: Here’s what I can tell [Obama] about math: raising taxes on anyone, no matter their income level, will do nothing to stimulate our economy, create jobs or balance our federal budget. Increasing taxes on the private sector will destroy jobs, further damaging our economy and sending even less revenue to the federal government.
NEWT GINGRICH: In the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, job creation must be job one for our political leaders. Instead, the president has chosen a path of political gamesmanship and class warfare with a plan that would kill jobs with higher taxes on small businesses and private capital.
Let’s play the “define rich” game that conservatives love; define “small business”.
Does a fox news personality with no employees making $5m/yr qualify as a small business?
I’ve run a “small business” for several recent years. Basically a sole proprietorship that produces slightly higher earnings for my accountant than the W-2 years.
An AGT of $250,000 that gets distributed as income is not, almost by definition, a “small businesses.” Which is why 97% of them won’t be affected by that at all.
Huntsman: “President Obama continues to demonstrate that he has no new ideas on how to create American jobs.”
And the Reps continue to demonstrate that they don’t know, either.
Or perhaps more accurately, none of our political leaders particularly cares about jobs, or the last couple of years would have been quite different.
They also say, the government does not create jobs, the free market does that. All Obama does is throwing the bones to all the job creators begging them to invest, the job creators say, but there is no demand. The poor and shrinking middle class has no money to consume because their wages have been stagnating, health care has gone up and many are unemployed. Obama really has no choice, he must go to where the money is to get some, that is all the rich who are hording their money or invest it by outsourcing production. The government can invest the money at home by spending and hiring construction companies and teachers and make them create jobs because there are profits to be made. Some of the money would get returned in form of taxes unless they have zero tax rates on profits. That is how a voter like me sees it.
Omitting the first six months of Obama adminstration, 2.5 million private sector jobs have been created, compared with the total of 1.8 million for the entirety of Bush’s two terms and cutting out the first six months of his administration when the economy was in the 2000-01 recession. Again, Republican live in a fact free universe.