I'm sure the teabaggers in DC today will be thanking Obama and the Democratic Congress for overcoming GOP obstructionism and lowering taxes to their lowest level in 60 years?
On April 15, after laboring through their taxes, many Americans may be asking if the president meant what he said. More than three quarters of Americans, according to a CBS News/ New York Times poll released that same month, thought the Obama administration has either kept taxes the same for most Americans or increased them. The latest CBS News/ New York Times poll released yesterday shows that as many as 34 percent of Americans think Mr. Obama raised taxes.
Today, thousands of Tea Partiers will descend on Washington to declare they've been "Taxed Enough Already." Yesterday's poll found that 64 percent of Tea Party supporters think the administration has raised taxes -- a finding that might leave Democrats banging their heads against their desks.
"The American people need to be reminded that 98 percent of Americans got a tax cut last year," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday.
Reid was referring to the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus -- essentially, the only Obama policy to really impact people's 2009 tax returns. In fact, tax refunds reached an all-time high this year in part because of the stimulus, the president said in his weekly address on Saturday. Meanwhile, taxes are at their lowest levels in 60 years, according to William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution.
"The relation between what is said in the tax debate and what is true about tax policy is often quite tenuous," Gale told Hotsheet. "The rise of the Tea Party at at time when taxes are literally at their lowest in decades is really hard to understand."
The misconception is largely due to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, living in their alternate reality and sharing it with their audience of millions of incredulous conservatives. But it's also a failure of Democrats to sell their accomplishments.
98 percent of Americans got tax cuts. The richest two percent, well, they didn't. The teabaggers, doing the bidding of America's richest elite, will remain outraged about that injustice. So they are always welcome to send their record-high tax refunds to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly. That way, they can prove once and for all that they are not all sound and ignorant fury.
Or are they more concerned about the deficit? If so, they are always free to tear up that refund check, doing their part to lower America's deficit.
Actions! They should would speak louder than their angry, uninformed words.