Typically, the last thing on Earth that a sitting President about to run for re-election would do twelve months out.....is promise to raise taxes. Today, the promise came. President Obama now says that the only way ahead for the nation to survive....is to raise taxes....and the target is the folks who make more than $250k. Naturally, this would be approved by most Democrats and by most folks who make less than $250k.
Logically, you sit and pause over a strategy like this. Most folks are completely safe. In fact, if you make $30k a year on salary....it's a 99.9 percent chance that you absolutely pay no taxes whatsoever.
Most folks would listen to the suggestion and fall into a daze....readily agreeing that we just tax the big guys and everything else will fall into place.
Course, if you gazed over to the senators standing there and running for office next year.....they have to be scratching their head and wondering who will donate to their re-election campaign? It wasn't the guy making $30k a year. The computer technician making $80k a year might have given $100 to their campaign but that would be it. The banker making $180k a year? He might have donated $1k over to the Senator's campaign. But the truth is....the $5k checks came from guys making $250k or more.
The governors running in 2012? Well...they might need big bucks along the way, and these $250k or more salary folks....were the ones who carried the bulk of weight for these elections.
I'm going to make a guess that the only Senator this weekend to really hype the President's message is Harry Reid and those who don't have to run in 2012. The rest of these guys are keeping their mouth shut and probably won't readily support the President's message unless they gets lots of government deals for their local counties or states.
What happens if the President gets his game lined up and actually passed? It's a curious thing....some $250k guy comes along and donates $10k to the election campaign of some Senator. The Senator writes a wonderfully written seven line piece of tax code and automatically invalidates the President's tax on some wealthy guy who owns a 30-acre horse ranch. The rich guy gets a $50k credit on his empty ranch, or a $10k tax credit for his renovation of a barn, and then things go back to normal again.
Eventually, a bunch of Senators write lots of new tax code....giving out credits left and right for just about anything.
Two years into the President's next four years.....he suddenly says that that tax revenue isn't covering the requirements. Strangely enough, he blames the wealthy yet again, and starts another campaign to tax the wealthy yet again. Senator Snuffy smiles as he gets paid campaign money to fix the President's mess.
As hard as you can try to fix something....there's a guy out there to unfix what you fixed. And behind that guy....there is another guy to fix what the first guy did to unfix your fix. Bottom line: only in America.
