Nobody likes a hypocrite. American voters have been particularly harsh on candidates who are caught talking out of both sides of their mouths, especially when it comes to how their hard-earned money is used.
Broken promises on taxes have even brought down presidents. The case can be made that George H. W. Bush would have won a second term if not for the pesky “read my lips, no new taxes” line.
Bush ended up having to eat those words when he begrudgingly agreed to a 1990 budget deal that hiked taxes, and his opponents — especially Bill Clinton — never let him forget it.
But it now may be a Democrat who is having his “read my lips” moment. Joe Biden has officially entered the race for the White House, and he’s trying desperately to paint himself as a moderate working-class ally in a crowded 2020 field.
It wasn’t as prominent as Bush’s 1988 utterance, but Biden made a similar “no new taxes” pledge 20 years later which could still come back to haunt him.
While he was campaigning with Barack Obama a month before the 2008 election, the future vice president promised blue collar Americans that they wouldn’t see a single cent of new taxes.
“No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama’s plan will see one single penny of their tax raised whether it’s their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax,” Biden declared during the nationally televised vice presidential debate.
“Any tax” means, well, any tax, no matter its form or what it’s called. But as the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform recently pointed out, Biden quickly broke that promise by championing a de facto tax that impacted almost everyone: Obamacare.
“When Obamacare was signed into law with Biden’s support, it imposed a series of middle class tax hikes including the individual mandate tax, new taxes on households with health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts, and an income tax hike on Americans facing high medical bills,” the group reminded readers in a post this week.
Biden was no small part of getting the Affordable Care Act — known more commonly as Obamacare — passed. His decades of time in Congress and key position as president of the Senate helped him petition lawmakers to pass the bill, and it was Biden who was famously caught on a hot mic declaring that the bill’s passage was “a big f—ing deal.”
It’s still a big deal, but in a very different way than Obama and Biden promised. The reality is that Obamacare relied on not-so-hidden taxes to function, and the measure hit middle-class Americans squarely in their wallets.
“Obamacare imposed a tax penalty of $695 for an individual and $2,085 for a family of four for failing to buy ‘qualifying’ health insurance as defined by Obama-Biden rules,” Americans for Tax Reform explained.
“The tax hit low and middle-income families hard: 76.86% of households stuck paying the tax made less than $50,000 per year, a blatant violation of Biden’s pledge to the American people,” ATR continued.
But but but, that wasn’t really a tax, liberal defenders of Biden will inevitably insist. Au contraire: It certainly was to the people who had to pay it, and even the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate was without a doubt a tax.
“In a ruling that took the legal community by surprise, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the individual mandate was permissible as a tax,” CNBC reported last year.
That controversial ruling by the highest court in the United States saved the Affordable Care Act from being thrown out completely, but it confirmed once and for all that the key parts of Obamacare — especially the individual mandate — are taxes.
And those taxes hit middle class Americans making under $50,000 the hardest. In other words, Biden is full of it.
Will the former vice president’s numerous opponents in the 2020 race bring this up? That remains to be seen. But either way, it’s important for the American people to remember that broken promise, and think twice before they believe Biden’s lines about fighting for working class voters.
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