The big speech tonight at the DNC convention is being delivered by former President Bill Clinton. Taxpayers should remember that Clinton is on record opposing the Taxmageddon tax hikes which President Obama is explicity running on. Here is what Clinton said in an interview with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo on June 5, 2012:
MARIA BARTIROMO: So does that mean extending the tax cuts?
PRES. BILL CLINTON: Well, I think what it means is they will have extend– they will probably have to put everything off until early next year. That's probably the best thing to do right now. But the Republicans don't want to do that unless he agrees to extend the tax cuts permanently, including for upper income people.
And I don't think the president should do that. That's going to– that's what they're fighting about. I don't have any problem with extending all of it now, including the current spending level.
By contrast, President Obama has said that he wants to raise taxes on households making more than $250,000 per year. Here is what he had to say at a White House press briefing on July 9, 2012:
So that’s why I believe it’s time to let the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans — folks like myself — to expire. (Applause.) And, by the way, I might feel differently — because it’s not like I like to pay taxes — (laughter) — I might feel differently if we were still in surplus. But we’ve got this huge deficit, and everybody agrees that we need to do something about these deficits and these debts. So the money we’re spending on these tax cuts for the wealthy is a major driver of our deficit, a major contributor to our deficit, costing us a trillion dollars over the next decade.
By the way, these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth. So we can’t afford to keep that up, not right now. So I’m not proposing anything radical here. I just believe that anybody making over $250,000 a year should go back to the income tax rates we were paying under Bill Clinton — back when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history, and plenty of millionaires to boot.
To be clear, that means that President Obama is for raising the top two tax rates from 33 and 35 percent today to 36 and 39.6 percent next year. President Clinton is opposed to that tax rate hike.
Maybe it's because President Clinton knows that raising the top two tax rates is a tax rate hike on nearly 1 million small employers. It's these employers who make up most of the small business sector and employ most everyone working for a small business.
Presumably, Clinton is also opposed to raising the capital gains tax rate from 15 to nearly 24 percent, and from raising the dividends tax rate from 15 to nearly 45 percent (as President Obama has proposed to do).
This is to say nothing of the other components of Taxmageddon, most notably the 20 new or higher taxes totaling a net $1 trillion in Obamacare. It's pretty bad when your own keynote speaker disagrees with your central tax hike plank.