Despite hopes that President Barack Obama might embrace fundamental tax reform during his final two years in the White House, he instead "threw a hand grenade" at the issue, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said Tuesday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"With a Republican House and a Republican Senate there was a possibility that we could reduce marginal rates, do what Reagan did in a bipartisan way, take rates down, broaden the base," said Norquist. "No tax increase, but simplify and make the tax code less destructive of economic growth."
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But Obama has gone in a "tax and spend, taking taxes up not down" direction, according to Norquist, one the president will expound on in tonight's
State of the Union address.
"He's looking at $320 billion in new tax hikes," he said. "He's looking at massive new spending programs and none of these things will actually pass Congress, he knows that. So he's decided to play politics with the last two years of his presidency instead of accomplish something which I guess some of us thought maybe he'd shift from the last six years approach."
Obama has reverted to a "campaigning" mode of governing because he is good at the former and bad at the latter, according to Norquist.
"If you're not very good at governing everything is a campaign and we've seen him whenever he gets in trouble or stumbles or things don't go the way he wanted them to he goes back to being a candidate, not a president. He spent most of his presidency as a candidate."
If Obama actually wanted to help middle income Americans there's a plethora of things he could do, such as undo the Obamacare mandate that makes it so expensive for businesses to hire workers, resulting in large swaths of people who have given up looking for work.
Instead, Obama's "trickle down taxation" model hurts the middle class. Norquist said the tobacco tax that Obama raised during his first month in office is a good example.
"The average tobacco user earns $40,000 a year," he said. "The first punch he threw right into middle income America."
Another example, Norquist offered, is how
Obama misled the American people about the true cost of Obamacare.
"We're going to be taxing 80 percent of people to provide free and subsidized healthcare to 20 percent," said Norquist. "He likes to talk about 99 and 1. He's talking 80 percent on Obamacare to try and create subsidies for 20 percent. This is what [Jonathan] Gruber, the architect of his plan, described it as, taxing the 80 percent to subsidize the 20 percent. We have to lie to the 80 percent because they're stupid in order to get them to sign up for this and then we make it all mandatory and call it something else."
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