Another Broken Obama Campaign Promise
Less than 4 months into his messianic presidency Barak Obama has (inadvertently, even ignorantly) broken one of his biggest campaign promises.
“I can make a firm pledge… no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.” (emphasis added) That’s what Barak Obama was spouting throughout his year and a half campaign for President.
But now the anointed one has just signed a bill that drastically increases tobacco taxes! An increase of 159 percent (!) took effect on April 1st (and it was no April Fools joke) which can only labeled as astounding! Can you imagine if any other tax was increased over 100%, let alone 159%?
The previous federal tax on tobacco was $0.39 a pack. Now it’s $1.01 per pack! And it doesn’t stop at cigarettes either. The tax includes cigars, pipe tobacco, etc. (Though the rate of the increase on those products admittedly isn’t nearly as much as the tax on cigarettes).
According to census and other statistics over half of all smokers are low income and one out of four is classified as officially poor in that they live below the poverty line.
Sorry Mr. Messiah but that’s a “form of tax increase” on “families earning less than $250,000 a year” in my book, and anyone else’s who doesn’t worship the ground you walk on.
On top of that according to Nobel economist Gary Becker a 10 percent increase in the cost of a pack of cigarettes (which the tobacco companies have already implemented in anticipation of the tax increase to make up for the expected revenue loss) will cause an 8 percent decline in sales. So the tobacco companies could be forced to layoff roughly 117,000 of it’s 1.2 million employees adding to the already considerable job loss count!
Great strategery BHO! (a little ode to George W Bush there)
And that’s another reason WE WANT HIM TO FAIL!
