I watched Obama’s press conference today, and he is a wonder to behold. He is a relentless demagogue who plays Americans against Americans and sets up false choices as part of a class warfare agenda.
Here’s a false choice (my rough transcription) which jumped out at me during the Q&A:
“Republican leaders need to ask their consituents if they are willing to sacrifice the safety of their children for a tax break for a corporate jet owner.”
This was typical throughout the press conference. He’s the only reasonable one, the only one who cares about people, the only one trying hard to reach a “balanced” debt deal, and so on and so on, the facts be damned. Of course, if it seems to some that he’s been detached, it’s only because he’s been so busy working on the Taliban, and bin Laden, and the Greece crisis.
He had the audacity to say with a straight face that his administration is trying to remove burdensome regulations, when in fact Obamacare and Dodd-Frank alone impose vast regulations (most of which have not been written yet, which freezes business investment) on virtually every area of the economy.
Oh, Obama’s jet plane owners gambit is worse than that!
Apparently Obama doesn’t recall (DRUGS?) that the latest iteration of the tax break in question was put into place as part of his own 2009 “stimulus!”
Just a few months after lawmakers scolded auto executives for flying to Washington in private jets, Congress approved a tax break in the stimulus package to help businesses buy their own planes.
The incentive — first used to help plane makers recover from the 2001 terror attacks — sharply reduces the up front tax bill for companies who buy assets like business planes.
Remember that ”stimulus” passed without even one Republican House member’s vote!
If Obama is so worried that corporate-jet owners getting better treatment than school kids, why did he give that tax break for the former, and shut down minority scholarships in DC for the latter?
Maybe Mr. Jacobson should pause for a moment to consider why a statement like that would resonate so strongly with so many Americans.
@Greg:
Maybe you should seek professional help.
If you cannot see why that statement is a blatant lie, a strawman, and doesn’t “resonate with many Americans”, you are pathologically ill.
Suck remarks resonate with hateful and envious leftists like yourself who itch to tell others how to think and live. The sane people? Not so much.
@Greg:
His speech, Greg, was intended to elicit such feelings. Obama, and his speech writer, do not care about the truth in these matters.
It’s never, in reality, the choice that Obama, or any liberal, presents. Of course, since he said it, you believe him, which, incidentally, shows how close to being a lemming you really are.
I wonder if Obama will get the same result with private jet owners and builders as he got after he STUPIDLY called down evil on Las Vegas?
It will serve him right to put an American jet builder under via his thoughtless words repeated over and over.
I think perhaps you overestimate the Svengali-like powers of Barack Obama, and discount the fact that he often says what a lot of people already have on their minds. That particular statement wasn’t literal. It was figurative. People get that.
Lemmings, btw, aren’t really subject to periodic fits of mass-suicidal behavior. It’s a myth that began with a 1958 Walt Disney movie, having as much basis in fact as the more recent Hundredth Monkey myth. I believed it for a long time myself, having seen the movie as a kid. It’s still good material for a for a metaphor.
On the one hand you say he overestimates obama’s svengali like powers, then claim he says what people have on their mind. Wow. You’re such an obama drone you don’t even realise how you just contradicted yourself.
Again, obama only speaks for far leftists like himself. You aren’t capable of seeing that and never will be.
Drudge had a link today to the fact that IF Obama got what he wanted with regards ”jet plane owners,” it would all only put a 1/10th of a % dent in Obama’s proposed budget spending!
The Wa Po put it all another way…..
[Obama] six times mentioned eliminating a tax loophole for corporate jets, frequently pitting it against student loans or food safety.
>It’s a potent image, but in the context of a $4-trillion goal, it is essentially meaningless. <
The item is so small the White House could not even provide an estimate of the revenue that would be raised, but other estimates suggest it would amount to $3 billion over 10 years.
Meanwhile, student financial assistance, just for 2011, is about $42 billion.
[Or $420 Billion over 10 years!]
So the corporate jet loophole — which involves the fact that such assets can be depreciated over five years, rather than the seven for commercial jets — just is not going to raise a lot of money. It certainly wouldn’t save many student loans.
——————–
Also buried at the end of the Wa Po article is this nugget:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=2796&topic2ID=40&topic3ID=58&DocTypeID=2
Obama calls for “tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires” — eliminating the ability of people making more than $250,000 to itemize their deductions.
That proposal would raise $290 billion over 10 years.
Wait a minute, the president said he would target “millionaires and billionaires” and yet the fine print of his proposal would affect couples making more than $250,000 (and individuals making more than $200,000)? That’s right.
@Greg:
A couple of points.
One, thank you for pointing that out about lemmings. Proof, again, that one can learn something new everyday.
Two, no one is attributing any “powers” of the extraordinary to Obama. I merely pointed out that he is engaging in giving false choices in presenting his case, and nothing of the truth. The fact that people, in general, are quite stupid and choose to believe everything a politician says, regardless of party affiliation or political leanings, is abused by such actions of our politicians. When the light of truth is shown upon it, though, many of those ‘believers’ end up seeing it for what it really is. Pure political pandering.