http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/12/05/coming-3-trillion-tax-increase-on-middle-class/
Jerome R. Corsi
Getting Republicans to agree to a tax increase on “the rich” is not the ultimate aim of the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress, says noted tax activist Grover Norquist.
“This is just the first act of a two- or three-act play,” Norquist said in an exclusive interview with WND.
Norquist, president and founder of
Americans for Tax Reform, said the first act “is to get congressional
Republicans to put their fingerprints on what amounts to a minor tax
increase.”
“After raising taxes on the rich a little bit, the Democrats will come back for serious tax revenue,” he said.
“In acts two and three, the Democrats
will come back for the real money – an energy tax and a value-added tax
that will impact everybody, especially the middle class.”
Norquist insisted Democrats in Congress
and the establishment press are playing an elaborate game designed to
blame Republicans for budget deficits and keep serious discussion of
spending cuts and entitlement reform off the table.
“Congressional Democrats know raising
taxes on the rich will not produce enough tax revenue to reduce
significantly the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits being run by
the Obama White House,” he said.
“The reason the Democrats scream ‘tax
the rich, tax the rich,’ is because they are going to pivot very soon to
place a 3 trillion-dollar tax increase on the middle class, and they
want ringing in the public’s ears that there wouldn’t have had to do
this if the Republicans in Congress had acted right away to place a
decent size tax on the rich.”
Norquist believes the Democrat strategy risks a tax revolt.
“The size of Tea Party Two is going to dwarf Tea Party One,” he predicted.
Norquist contends Obama is “overstating his mandate.”
“Four years ago, he was convinced he was
king,” Norquist said. “He took a 70-percent approval down to 50 percent
and lost a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in the
process. Now, Obama starts at 52 percent and he is going not only to
spend too much but also too tax too much.”
Nevertheless, in the current “fiscal
cliff” negotiations regarding the expiration of the Bush tax cuts,
Norquist has been criticized in the establishment press as a hindrance
to reaching an agreement.
At the center of criticism is the anti-tax pledge that Norquist has persuaded 95 percent of Republican lawmakers to sign.
“Attacking me and the anti-tax pledge is
the same old tactic the Democrats used two years ago in the debate over
the debt ceiling,” he said.
The difference this time, however, is
that Democrats “have no intention, whatsoever, in seriously talking
about spending restraint.”
“So this time,” he said, “it becomes
even more important to misdirect the attention of the American people,
to say the only reason Republicans preventing a grand bargain by
opposing tax increases is because Grover Norquist is telling Republicans
what to do.”
In a front page article last Tuesday,
Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake claimed Norquist and his anti-tax
pledge are “in danger of becoming Washington relics as more and more
defectors inch toward accepting tax increases” to avoid going over the
fiscal cliff.
“Week after week, Democratic leaders
have bashed Republicans for pledging fealty to Norquist rather than
working independently,” Blake wrote.
Norquist dismissed such statements as an
attempt to misdirect the attention of the American public from the real
issue at hand: runaway federal spending, not a failure to raise taxes.
He doesn’t see any evidence his anti-tax
pledge is losing its potency. The Washington Post article, he noted,
produced as evidence a claim House Majority Leader Eric Cantor had
suggested that the anti-tax pledge would not dictate GOP strategy on the
fiscal cliff.
“So we get this headline, ‘Cantor
Denounces Pledge,’ but that’s not what Cantor said,” Norquist countered.
“What Cantor really said was that even without the pledge, the
Republicans in Congress would be against raising taxes. Why? Because
raising taxes would be bad for the economy.”
Norquist argued Republicans in Congress
learned it is risky to increase taxes when President George H. W. Bush
went down to defeat in 1992 after violating his “read my lips” pledge.
He insists the anti-tax pledge he promotes through Americans for Tax Reform is not the real issue in the fiscal cliff debate.
“If I became a Buddhist monk, it
wouldn’t change anything,” he said, arguing it’s a pledge congressional
Republicans make to voters, not to him.
“Republicans in Congress would still be against raising taxes because raising taxes never works,” he said.
Democrats are playing a game of three-card monte, Norquist asserted.
“Because the Democrats in Congress have
no intention of talking about entitlement reform,” he said, “the liberal
press rolls out the usual list of Republican compromisers who will say
raising taxes would be acceptable if the Democrats engage in spending
cuts the Democrats have no intention of ever making.”
Norquist predicts Congress will not
raise taxes to avoid going over the fiscal cliff, because the Republican
majority in the House is the last line of defense.
“The Republicans in House of
Representatives are survivors,” he said. “The Democrats have already
thrown at them everything you can imagine, and the Republicans in the
House are still a majority, serving in districts that will not be
redrawn for another 10 years. The Republicans in the House can defend
themselves against everything the Democrats throw against them.”
Norquist suggested in the final
analysis, the House Republicans could simply pass the plan proposed by
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proving to the American public that federal
budget deficits can be reduced without raising taxes on the rich.
The Ryan plan was passed by the House
April 15 by a vote of 235 to 193, with no votes from Democrats. The
Democrat-controlled Senate voted it down a month later, 57–40. The bill
sought to reduce the 10-year federal deficit by capping discretionary
spending and dismantling Obamacare.
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