Obama Will Have To Raise Your Taxes

Even liberal Democrats have to admit that Obama can't keep his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class:

When Obama returns home, former Clinton adviser Matt Miller says he'll face a mounting budget crisis—and will have to come clean about needing to raise our taxes.

Just before President Obama left for his boffo European tour, he offered an uncharacteristic evasion at home that revealed a looming political vulnerability. It came during his prime-time press conference on March 24, when he called on Chip Reid of CBS.

“At both of your town-hall meetings in California last week,” Reid began, “you said, quote, ‘I didn't run for president to pass on our problems to the next generation.’ But under your budget, the debt will increase $7 trillion over the next ten years. The Congressional Budget Office says $9.3 trillion. ... Isn't that kind of debt exactly what you were talking about when you said ‘passing on our problems to the next generation?’”

For a president who has been unusually willing to answer the questions he is actually asked, Obama’s reply was a telling Beltway dodge. He talked about his Republican critics having failed fiscal responsibility when they were in charge. He tweaked the GOP for lacking the courage to offer an alternative budget themselves. He offered a sidebar on the assumptions used by the White House and the CBO in their projections—differences that were irrelevant, because whichever forecast you believe, the new debt slated to be added on Obama’s watch is unprecedented. And he peddled the stock administration line that you can’t fix the budget without renewing economic growth and slowing the surge in health costs.

The one hard truth Barack Obama won’t utter is that all Americans will have to pay higher taxes before long.

But Obama never answered the question of how his epic debt can be squared with his call for generational responsibility. He can’t, because it can’t.

Behind this fudge is a secret: Obama and his advisers expect to limit such debt via broader tax increases, presumably in a second term. As every honest observer knows (and as I show in this chapter of my book The Tyranny of Dead Ideas), once this recession is past, taxes will go up in the years ahead no matter who is in power. John McCain’s top economic advisers from the campaign say so themselves. That’s because we’re retiring the baby boom, which means we’ll be doubling the number of people on Social Security and Medicare. We already have trillions of dollars in unfunded promises in these programs. The math simply doesn’t work at current levels of taxation.

This makes Obama’s debt dilemma an interesting case study in how an uncommonly forthright politician weighs the virtue of candor versus its political cost. Remember, Obama is the candidate who wouldn’t join the pandering when both McCain and Hillary Clinton were peddling that bogus gas-tax “holiday” last summer. He’s the president who routinely eschews happy talk, telling us the economy may well get worse before it gets better. But the one hard truth Barack Obama won’t utter is that all Americans will have to pay higher taxes before long.

Between the massive budget, bailouts, TARP and all the other stimulus nonsense, government will grow so large that Obama hopes the only option will be higher taxes to fund all the promises he's made. Since it's rare for a government program to be terminated, Obama's impact on future generations will be devastating.