In any case, suspending the gasoline tax won't amount to a hill of beans as long as the price of crude oil continues to skyrocket -- and it will, given the exploding demand for oil in China and India and the refusal of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase output.
The Arizona senator forgets that 70 percent of the price of gasoline is directly tied to the price of the crude oil from which it is refined. At the rate that the price of crude oil keeps rising, any suspension of the federal gasoline tax would be quickly offset by the soaring crude price, resulting in no savings for consumers at all -- not to mention a massive addition to the already-bloated federal deficit.
Since When Is It 'Elitist' To Hike Capital-Gains Tax on Millionaires?
Once again, it's Senator McCain who doesn't understand. Those 100 million Americans he cites are, in fact, Americans who earn over $1 million a year -- including Obama himself and his wife, Michelle, who reported earning roughly $4 million on their 2007 income-tax return, mostly from royalties from the sale of his two books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope.
I don't know about you, but I don't consider millionaires to be part of the working class -- let alone the poor -- by a long shot. Never have, never will. And multimillionaires like McCain (worth $44 million) and the Clintons (worth $109 million, according to their 2007 tax return) -- not to mention multibillionaires like Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Ted Turner -- can certainly afford to pay higher capital-gains taxes. Indeed, they're a drop in the bucket to them.
In an interview with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" -- his first-ever one-on-one appearance on Murdoch's conservative-leaning cable news channel -- Obama fired back by noting that McCain "not only wants to continue some of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, he actually wants to extend them, and he hasn't told us really how he's going to pay for them. It's irresponsible. And the irony is he said [the Bush tax cuts were] irresponsible [in the first place]."
Obama also said he would not raise the capital-gains tax higher than it was under President Ronald Reagan and added, "I'm mindful that we've got to keep our capital-gains tax to a point where we can actually get more revenue."
An "elitist" would actively oppose any increase in the capital-gains tax -- indeed, an "elitist" would argue for even more cuts in that tax -- which is precisely what the Republicans continue to clamor for.
The Real Elitists Are the Republicans
The Republican Party has had the reputation of being the party of big business since the 1920s. But it was President Herbert Hoover's tepid response to the worsening economic calamity that became the Great Depression that solidified the GOP's image as the party of the wealthy -- an image it has never been able to shake off, even during the Reagan years.
The GOP is certainly more associated with Wall Street than with Main Street, since only a handful of the nation's top corporate executives -- most notably Buffet and Gates -- are registered Democrats. It's virtually de rigeur for members of the wealthy elite to vote Republican. And despite the best efforts of the party's far right wing, the so-called "country-club Republicans" came back with a vengeance during Bush's presidency.
The Democratic Party has always been the party of the working class -- even when it was the racially segregationist party during much of its history prior to the end of World War II and President Harry S. Truman's 1947 executive order to desegregate the Army.
So for the nominee-elect of the "rich people's party" to claim that the front-runner for the nomination of the "working-class party" is an elitist and out of touch with working-class Americans is the highest of the height of hypocritical B.S. Indeed, it's a sick joke.
Senator McCain should be ashamed of himself.
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