Roberton Williams and Rosanne Altshuler’s Five Myths About Your Taxes in the Washington Post on Sunday was such a useful piece one hesitates to criticize, but one confusion is so unfortunate that a correction is necessary. In all, the authors got about 3 and a half right out of five, which at the start of baseball season is really pretty good. They were right when pointing out that most people (75 percent by their estimates) pay some federal tax, even the many of the poor and virtually all the rich. …
Massive increases of spending by the Obama Administration, from the stimulus to its proposed budget, have created historically unprecedented large deficits that will push the nation’s debt level to unsustainable levels. It was only a matter of time before the proponents of big government began their push to substantially increase the amount of revenue raised by the federal government to close these budget gaps and pay for other big-government priorities like nationalized healthcare. The tax hike proposals offered so far—such as taxes on sugary drinks or tax hikes on alcoholic …
So, would President Obama’s budget plan really increase deficit spending much more than other modern presidents? Well, yeah, to the tune of seven times more, measured as a percentage of economic output, than under President Kennedy over 45 years ago — as you can see in this chart. It’s one of the 37 easy-to-follow information graphics in Heritage’s updated and expanded 2009 Federal Revenue and Spending Book of Charts. How much and how fast would our national debt go up under the Obama plan? Is it true that, amid the …
