Posted on 02/14/2012 4:09:32 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
President Barack Obama listed rising gas prices as among the many reasons to extend the payroll tax cut Tuesday, flanked by individuals the White House promoted as being affected by $40 per paycheck the average American would lose if the tax cut is not extended at the end of February.
The payroll tax funds Social Security. Cutting the tax would reduce funding to Social Security by $119 billion over the next year, on top of the $105 billion reduced from funding in 2011.
While Republican lawmakers have expressed plans to vote for a full-year extension to the tax cut, Obama told his audience Tuesday at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington that they must put pressure on Congress.
“Congress needs to extend that tax cut – along with vital insurance lifelines for folks who’ve lost their jobs during this recession – and they need to do it now, without drama and without delay,” Obama said. “No ideological sideshows to gum up the works. No self-inflicted wounds. Just pass this middle-class tax cut. Pass the extension of unemployment insurance. Do it before it’s too late, and I will sign it right away.”
House Republicans sought to extend the payroll tax cut for a full year in December. However, they agreed to a Senate Democratic proposal to extend it just for the first two months of 2012.
On Monday, Obama delivered a budget address in which he referred to the Bush tax cuts as $1 trillion in spending. However, on Tuesday, Obama stressed that the economy is improving and that this is not a time to reduce the amount of spending money.
“Allowing this tax cut to expire would make people’s lives harder right now,” Obama said. “It would make their choices more difficult. It would be $40 less for groceries to feed your kids; it would be $40 less for the medications you depend on; $40 less to cover bills and the rent; $40 less to take care of an elder parent, or to donate to a church or a charity.
“And when gas prices are on the rise again – because as the economy strengthens, global demand for oil increases – and if we start seeing significant increases in gas prices, losing that $40 could not come at a worse time,” Obama said. “One local entrepreneur named Thierry – where’s Thierry? He’s right here.
“He told us that $40 would cover the gas that gets him to his day job, or, alternatively, the Internet service his small business depends on. So he’d have to start making a choice – do I fill up my gas tank to get to my work, or do I give up my entrepreneurial dream. ‘Forty dollars,’ he wrote, ‘means a heck of a lot,’” the president added.
CNSNews.com reported last month that under Obama, the price of gas climbed by 83 percent.
When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, the city average price for one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $1.79, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figures are in nominal dollars: not adjusted for inflation. Five months later in June, unleaded gasoline was $2.26 per gallon, an increase of 26 percent. By December 2011, the price of regular unleaded gas per gallon was $3.28, an 83 percent increase from January 2009.
Cutting the payroll tax could make Social Security a less autonomous program than it had been before, Charles P. Blahous III, a member of the board of trustees for Social Security and Medicare, told CNSNews.com in December. With less payroll tax revenue coming in, the shortfall would have to be replaced with income taxes.
Social Security was established as a worker benefit program; to be funded by what employees paid into the system through payroll tax deductions. Replacing much of that financing with income tax revenue would fundamentally change Social Security, making it more like other government entitlement programs that are subject to political whims and budget priorities, Blahous said.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt put Social Security into place, he designed it to be funded separately from the general fund. He was quoted as saying, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.”
The Social Security board issued a report in August 2011 saying that Social Security ran a deficit in 2010 for the first time since 1983. The deficit for 2010 was $49 billion, and the deficit for 2011 is projected to be $46 billion, the report said.
Obama Cites Rising Gas Prices – Up 83 Percent Under His Tenure – Among Reasons to Extend Payroll Tax Cut
Full title too long.
The silver lining if gas reaches $4/gallon is that more people will actually blame the anointed one.
Oil and electrical usage are plunging in the US.
I suspect 6 months from now, even Baraq & his MSM buddies will be unable to cover up the truth.
And extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks creates jobs. lol.
$4/gallon gas won't make a bit of difference to the 47 million who are being fed by the government. Or the 49% who pay no income tax at all. Or the millions who live in federal housing. Or the millions who are on permanent unemployment benefits. Or the millions of people who are benefiting from the heating assistance program. Ad nauseum....
Those are the people who will re-elect this socialist..... Those and the hypocritical 54% of the Catholics.....
I would add 70% of the Jews, 54% of women, and 98% of the blacks. If the above is true, and I don't dispute it while praying it won't result, we are on the cusp of the beginning of the end, and that means it will effect the dependent classes who will have brought it about.
Inflation: the cruelest tax of all!
(That’s the only plan the government has left.)
“The silver lining if gas reaches $4/gallon is that more people will actually blame the anointed one.”
No, you need some impetus to drive home the exclamation point. You walk into the station and say to the clerk and assembled customers: “Thank you, obuma, for stealing food from my children’s mouths so I can drive to work.”
If there’s some fat welfare mommas in line, say: “I’m paying crazy cash for your idiot kid to collect social security disability, bitch, so stuff it.”
Then go fill up your tank.
This PoS has got to go. He is a sickening cancer on this country.
Regretfully, I think you are right. I have slowly come to the conclusion that decades of the "progressives" control of the educational system have resulted in what they wanted, i.e., the complete dumbing down of the American populace so as to accept socialism.
We should continue to fight on but I think the American Experiment is coming to an end.
Personally, I'm glad that I was born in 1940, since I have had the time to benefit enormoualy in the intervening years. I feel sorry for those who are of a much lesser age. They are so screwed.
Cherry-picked datapoints. If Republicans keep pushing this, the Obamanoids can (and almost certainly will) come right back and say that prices are no worse than they were the summer before Bush left office. As we have seen with the global warming thingy, it's all in how you choose your start and end points.
Americans really love the pain and misery they are feeling at the pump and the store. Obama’s poll numbers are surging. Atheism and Socialism is on the rise. A majority of the public are feeding off the government teat. Then no one likes any of the Republican candidates but everyone loves the 99 percenters and hates the rich and big business.
All this is a perfect storm for Obama’s re-election. We’ve lost this nation.
Time to head for Canada, at least they are moving to the right now.
I’m seeing those charts on Mish and Zerohedge. They certainly seem at odds with the MSM chorus of “economic recovery”.
What’s your feeling on this? (thanks)
please dear God, let it go up to $7. a gallon. Just til after the elction
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