Obama’s New Tax on the Poor, Just Redefined Away

During the campaign in 2008, President Obama made his tax message as clear as it could be: he wanted to tax the wealthy, and help the poor. He promised over and over that taxes on those making less than $250,000 would not go up. So why has the president proposed a health care tax on the poor?

A frequent line by candidate Obama in his stump speeches during the election went something like this:

“Let me be absolutely clear. If you are a family making less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes go up.”

Despite this promise, we’ve already had the federal tax hike on cigarettes to fund children’s health care (S-CHIP), an excise tax that impacts the poor profoundly more than the wealthy because of the inverse relationship between smoking and income.

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