Desperation Time

How desperate is President Obama to retain power?  Desperate enough that, after months and months of steadfastly stating that he was going to allow former President Bush's tax cuts "for the wealthy" to expire, he announced this week that he wanted to extend only the ones that helped people making $250,000 a year and less....showing once again that he is a champion of the middle class.  But the reality of that ploy?  We'll let that mouthpiece of corporate America - the Wall Street Journal - tell you what reality is.

So the 2013 tax cliff is a big enough economic problem that President Obama now wants to postpone it for some taxpayers. But it isn't so big that he's willing to curb his desire to raise taxes on tens of thousands of job-creating businesses.

That's the essence of Mr. Obama's announcement Monday that he wants Congress to extend current tax rates for a year, but only for those making less than $200,000 a year. This is a political gambit designed to protect Democrats who are starting to feel queasy about opposing GOP plans to extend all of the Bush rates as the economy weakens again. The ploy could help Democrats if Republicans fall for it, but it won't reduce the economic damage to the country.

By Mr. Obama's economic logic, tax increases matter on middle-income earners but are irrelevant to everyone else. "By the way, these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth," as he put it Monday....

The President dismissed all of this as merely affecting 3% of small business owners. But that includes tens of thousands of the most productive, fastest-growing small businesses—those most likely to hire workers amid a national jobless rate of 8.2%.

Congress's Joint Tax Committee—not a conservative outfit—estimates that in 2013 about 940,000 taxpayers will have enough business income to meet Mr. Obama's tax increase threshold. And of the roughly $1.3 trillion in net business income, about 53% will get hit with the higher tax rates.

This is because millions of businesses report their income as sole proprietors and subchapter S corporations that file under the individual tax code. So Mr. Obama wants these businesses to pay higher tax rates than the giant likes of General Electric or J.P. Morgan. Does that qualify as "tax fairness"?...

We also know from experience that high earners are most able to move their money to avoid high tax rates. If they don't have tax shelters at home, they can find opportunities abroad. Mr. Obama is running ads accusing Mitt Romney of sending jobs offshore, but the best way to send capital and jobs overseas is to raise U.S. tax rates to levels that aren't competitive with the rest of the world.

Emphasis mine.  Don't believe the WSJ when it talks about corporations offshored jobs and money?  Just take a look at what Cisco does to keep it's tax rates low.

So to review, President Obama, claiming to help the middle class, is actually going to be helping his pal, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, keep more corporate dollars out of the governments hands.  And yet the Democrats have the nerve to claim that Mitt Romney and the GOP are stooges of corporate America?  Do they really think the American voters are that dumb?  OR are they that certain that the have corporate media firmly enough in their back pocket that it will be covered up? Sadly, given that you are not seeing this in any of the lapdog media outlets I think the second question is more reality than anything else.