- President Barack Obama pressed his case on Saturday for achieving deficit reduction, in part by ending tax breaks and singling out hedge fund managers, oil companies and billionaires to take the hit.
Obama is locked in a dispute with Republicans over how to bring down the deficit as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling and prevent Washington from default.
Democrats insist that some tax increases be included in a deficit-cutting package.
[Obama] himself, as we just heard, said you can’t reduce the deficit to the levels we need without raising revenues. Then he talks about the [tax break for] corporate jets, which he mentioned not once but six times.
I did the math on this. If you collect the corporate jet tax every year for the next 5,000 years, you will cover one year of the debt that Obama has run up. One year.
To put it another way, if you started collecting that tax at the time of John the Baptist and you collected it every year — first in shekels and now in dollars — you wouldn’t be halfway to covering one year of the amount of debt that Obama has run up.
As for the other one, he mentions again and again, the oil depreciation tax break — if you collect that one for 700 years, you won’t cover a year of Obama deficits.
And then here’s my favorite. I worked it out in the car on the way here. If you collect the corporate jets and the oil tax together — get all the bad guys and the fat cats at once — and you collect it for 100 years, it covers the amount of debt Obama added… in February!
And he pretends that he’s the serious adult at the table.