Saturday, November 07, 2009

Obama Administration Claims That America Has No Taxes

When Bill "depends on what the meaning of "is" is" Clinton was revealed to have had sexual relations with "that woman, Miss Lewinsky", he claimed that he hadn't lied when he said he didn't have sexual relations with her, because he had his own private definition of what a sexual relationship is.

Now Obama is trying to do a similar trick when it comes to taxes. It has been clear for some time that if someone had yelled "you lie!" to Obama when he claimed that he didn't want to raise taxes for anyone with a household income below $250,000, then that person would have spoken the truth.

For example, the tax increase on cigarettes that Obama signed will not only hit a lot of people earning less than that, but it would actually tend to hit them to an even higher extent than people earning more than that. The same thing goes for the health insurance mandate, which for all practical purposes is a tax increase, something which even Obama's top economic advisor Larry Summers have pointed out.

Now I see that Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs in response to a reporter that had pointed out that the tax on cigarettes had been raised, claimed that the tax is not really a tax because "people make a decision to smoke". And similarly White House spokesman Linda Douglass argued with regard to the health insurance mandate that "a fee would only be imposed on those few who could afford to purchase insurance but refuse to do so".

So, according to Obama administration officials taxes aren't really taxes unless if people can avoid it by changing their behavior.

That definition not only contradicts the definition of taxes used by everyone outside the Obama administration, it would in fact imply that only a pure poll tax (also known as head tax), could be considered a tax. And since America as far as I know doesn't have such a tax, that would imply that America have no taxes according to the Obama administration!