Obama's War on Job Creators

Heritage Foundation

Today, President Barack Obama is expected to announce his latest plan for reducing the deficit, and central to it are $1.5 trillion in new taxes, aimed predominantly at wealthy Americans. Unfortunately for the 14 million unemployed Americans, the President is continuing down his steady path of ushering in big spending policies, then turning to even higher taxes in order to pay for them. Who ends up paying the price? America's job creators and those on the unemployment line. t’s a “glut the beast” strategy the President has employed before–increase spending as much as possible, and then argue that the only answer to the massive deficits is to increase taxes. Last week, the President played that philosophy to a tee when he unveiled another series of tax hikes intended to pay for more stimulus–his newly unveiled $447 billion American Jobs Act. Not surprisingly, the tax policies the President proposed were more of the same he has offered up since he first took office.

In a new paper, Heritage’s Curtis Dubay explains that the tax hikes in the President’s plan would be permanent, while his jobs policies would be temporary. And, in a senseless irony, those taxes would be levied on the very job creators whom America needs to create jobs. Dubay writes:

In the Administration’s poorly crafted and contradictory jobs package, the American people get permanent tax hikes that would enlarge the federal government to offset the cost of temporary jobs policies that would not create any jobs. In the long run, the tax hikes in this plan are more likely to destroy more jobs than the jobs policies create.

Unfortunately, President Obama will not consider policies that would actually create jobs by reducing the high level of uncertainty that persists in the economy today.

Those tax policies include raising taxes on job creators by capping the deductions that families and businesses earning more than $250,000 a year could claim. And that tax increase would be on top of the 3.8 percent surtax on investment income coming in 2013 under Obamacare–not to mention the new taxes that the President is proposing today.

The President also proposed tax hikes that target the oil industry and jet manufacturers, limiting their ability to “expense” purchases of capital equipment. Though Obama frames this tax as one on owners of corporate jets, Dubay says the result will be to increase their cost, thereby reducing demand–and hurting those who manufacture the planes. Read more about the details of those tax hikes in Dubay’s paper, “Obama’s Jobs Plan: Permanent Tax Hikes on Job Creators.”

On yesterday’s Fox News Sunday, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) explained the problem with the President’s spend-more-tax-more philosophy and the road that the President is going down. “If we tax investment in job creation more, you will get less of it,” Ryan explained. “This looks like to me not a very good sign, because it looks like the President wants to move down the class warfare path.” And while the President walks America down that path, he’s marching to the beat of the big government drum that will lead to more spending, then more taxes to pay for it, and fewer jobs as a result.

Quick Hits:

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Fears over a possible Greek default cast a pall over Wall Street on Monday morning with futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping 166 points.
Security forces in Yemen’s capital, Sana, opened fire on tens of thousands of anti-government protesters on Sunday, killing at least 26.
Senior Israeli and Palestinian officials met in New York on Sunday ahead of a planned Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations.
VIDEO: Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) says President Obama’s jobs plan will make America’s unemployment problem even worse. Watch our interview on Foundry.org.