Existing and proposed Obama debt amounts to $4,000 tax hike on middle class

Illustration by J.K. for The US ReportPresident Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly tell audiences GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would raise taxes on the middle class. The claim is false; it’s been disproved as often as it’s been made.

Biden did have a moment of clarity this week when he admitted the middle class has been “buried” the last four years. For once, the vice president got it exactly right.

The Romney campaign has fired back with results from an independent study that suggested the amount of debt Obama has proposed or implemented would raise taxes by $4,000 on the middle class.

Obama has also claimed he’s only responsible for 10 percent of the debt. That’s been proved false by at least two fact-check groups I perceive as sympathetic to Democrats.

No one ever asks Obama about his own earmarks as a senator—some were perpetuating. No one ever points out that Democrats took control of both the Senate and the House in the 2006 midterms—Bush’s final two years of debt were in fact Democrats’ debt as well.

Pierce Scranton, Economic Policy Director for Romney, summed it up:

How does the President propose to deal with our fiscal crisis?  That’s a good question.  The short answer is that he doesn’t have a plan.  He pretends that he’s only responsible for 10 percent of the increase (a claim that has already been discredited here, and here).  His budget was rejected unanimously by Congress—414-0 in the House and 99-0 in the Senate.  That’s a case study in failed leadership, not a plan for tackling one of the most pressing issues facing the country.  Not a single Democrat in Congress supported his budget.  And for good reason.

 Under the President’s budget, the national debt would increase to $20 trillion at the end of a second Obama Administration, or 106% of GDP. To put that number into perspective, Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio will hit 90.5% by the end of 2013.  Under the President’s budget, spending actually gets larger as a share of the economy at the end of ten years going from 22.3% of GDP in 2016 to 22.6% of GDP in 2022.  At the same time, the President’s stated policy is to do nothing to address the solvency of entitlement programs like Social Security that will only make matters worse.

There are also a number of tax hikes in the healthcare tax bill commonly referred to as ObamaCare—at least five will impact the middle class.

Media have apparently been too preoccupied to focus on Obama's actual record.

(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Oct. 3, 2012)