Responding to the question: Is "Obamacare crumbling?" Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform writes in Politico’s The Arena:
“If Obama is going to win re-election with his low approval ratings and the electorate angry with his stimulus spending and 21 tax hikes he needs to turn lemons into lemonade.
The CLASS ACT scrapped? An embarrassment? Only for those with weak sales skills.
Vote Obama – the only president to actually kill a costly, dishonest, Ponzi scheme entitlement program. Has Perry done that? No. Romney? No, I probably got the idea from him anyway.
Obama: saving you Trillions by ending wasteful spending and entitlement programs that would have gagged Charles Ponzi.
Other possibilities: Vote for Obama – he ended the two year travesty of $800 billion wasted in “stimulus.”
Vote for Obama: he is slowly undoing the irresponsible tripling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
It is easy once you get the hang of it.”
Fox News reports:
“President Obama’s proposed ‘Buffett Rule’– which would force the wealthiest Americans to pay higher taxes to help cut the nation’s deficits — has met its Republican match.
Republican lawmakers have introduced their own “Buffett Rule” that would allow billionaire investors like Warren Buffett who say they’re not paying enough taxes to voluntarily give more money to the federal government.
‘Sen. Thune should be commended for solving Warren Buffett’s seemingly intractable problem,’ said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a powerful conservative group. ‘Thanks to Sen. Thune’s leadership, Mr. Buffett soon will be able to simply write a check when he thinks the government can spend his money better than he can.’ ”
Rick Klein writes for ABC News:
“Leading antitax advocate Grover Norquist told us on ABC’s ‘Top Line’ today that presidential candidate Herman Cain’s now famous ‘9-9-9’ plan is ‘very dangerous,’ since each of the 9 percent taxes he’s proposing could easily grow larger.
‘I’m very concerned about three different taxes—every one of them can grow,’ said Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and keeper of the famous anti-tax ‘pledge’ that the vast majority of Republican candidates and officeholders in Washington sign.
‘To put tapeworms in your tummy to try and maintain your weight—they may have their own idea about their growth patterns and what they want to do. Creating new taxes is a very dangerous project,’ Norquist said.
Norquist said he doesn’t think the 9-9-9 plan violates his group’s pledge, which Cain has signed. But he said that’s not possible to know for sure since ‘it’s not clearly written down, it hasn’t been scored by CBO,’ a reference to the Congressional Budget Office.
‘Cain has taken the pledge, he understands what that’s about. The question is about the structure of the tax rather than the total burden,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t create new possibilities for growth,’ Norquist added. ‘Look, I applaud Herman Cain’s statement that the present system is too high, it’s too re-distributionist, it moves money from one side to another, let’s take rates radically down, let’s end this double- and triple-taxation of savings. But the way he does it creates these new taxes like a VAT [value-added tax] and a retail sales tax that have a dangerous history of growing.’
Norquist has come under fire from some prominent Republicans – notably Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. – for enforcing a pledge that they argue is holding back the possibility of a ‘grand bargain’ on the deficit, by foreclosing any discussion of additional revenues.
Asked whether there’s any scenario where he’d waive the pledge in the interest of a super-committee-produced compromise that could save the nation’s fiscal health, Norquist said it isn’t his place to grant dispensations.
‘While I appreciate the attention, the pledge that the majority of the members of the House and 41 senators signed was not to me. The pledge was to their constituents that they wouldn’t raise taxes,’ he said.
‘The pledge is a guarantee that whatever tax reform might come out of the super-committee would be revenue-neutral. And that’s our best protection, both to require real spending restraint instead of the phony spending cuts and real tax reform.’
‘I can’t say it’s okay to raise taxes — they promised their constituents they wouldn’t do it. The people who run against them in primaries and generals in the future will hold them — their voters will hold them to their commitment.’
‘Tax increases on the table, spending cuts never happen. Tax increases off the table, spending cuts happen. We now know how to go forward,’ Norquist said.”