Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, October 02, 2008 2:49:13 PM
Robert Novak makes a mockery of his retirement — thankfully — with an observation
about Barack Obama and his populist rhetoric on tax policy. When John
McCain pressed Obama to explain how he would pay for the hundreds of
billions in new spending Obama proposes without raising taxes broadly,
Obama said he would “close loopholes” to recover the revenue. Novak
doesn’t think Obama can define “loophole”, at least not broadly enough
to find over $300 billion a year in revenues:
How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that
John McCain claimed in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 in
Oxford, Miss., that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were
elected president? Obama replied, by “closing tax loopholes.”
Obama was no more specific in the debate, and tax experts doubt that
structural changes without increasing taxes can raise anything close to
that amount of money. …
Obama has made clear that he would try to roll back President Bush’s
tax cuts, but that does not come under the definition of a “loophole.”
A loophole consists of a conniving tax attorney discovering a weakness
in the Internal Revenue Code or such a weakness intentionally
legislated by Congress under the instigation of crafty lobbyists. The
only specific tax legislation contained in Obama’s paper would raise
the capital gains rate for most shareholders, restore taxation on
dividend income to pre-Bush standards and restore the full estate tax.
In other words, Obama doesn’t have a clue what “loophole” means.
When he talks about closing loopholes, what he really means is that he
will impose higher taxes on investments and savings as a means to soak
the rich. Obama isn’t interested in closing gaps in the tax code, but
in hiking the rates demanded by the code. It’s redistributionism, the
kind of populist pap that won him the nomination, and which Obama hopes
will win him the White House.