Obama says YOUR money is HIS money

A breathtakingly bold statement was made by the President today when he claimed that, in effect, all of your earnings belong to the government, and that the government is "spending" money when it lets you keep part of your earnings.

He didn't put it in those words, exactly, but he said that we should "reform the individual tax code" by - and here are the key words - "reducing tax expenditures so that there is enough savings to both lower rates and lower the deficits."

Confused? He wants you to be. When he says "tax expenditures" he means "letting you keep your own money," and that act of letting you keep your money needs to be reduced. He honestly believes that every dollar you DON'T pay in taxes is you spending the government's money. For example:

Let's say you own a house, and you have a mortgage. Each month you make a mortgage payment that includes a healthy chunk of interest, and at the end of the year your mortgage company sends you a statement that says you paid, oh, let's say, $7,500 in interest.

Now let's say you have a taxable income of $40,000 a year. That puts a married couple in the 15% tax rate bracket, so your federal income tax would be $6,000 a year ($40K times 15%). But when you deduct that $7,500 in mortgage interest you paid, your taxable income would become $32,500, and the 15% income tax would be $4,875. It means you pay $1,125 less in taxes.

In Obama's mind, that $1,125 you save is considered SPENDING BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. That's right, when he says "spending from the tax code," THAT'S what he's talking about.

Such deductions, in the Obama/liberal mindset, are "tax expenditures." They think that they have first claim on your earnings, and then they are "spending money" when they let you keep some of it.

That's how he can propose "reform" - which means limiting deductions and increasing the taxes you pay - and call it "reduced spending." He said today that he is going to propose a new budget - because the one he proposed just two months ago has been trashed - and that the new budget will call for "tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in spending from the tax code."

Read that again: "Cut about $1 trillion in spending from the tax code."

What that means in plain English, as spoken by non-liberal, non-Washington types: "I want a $1 trillion tax increase."

Only a Washington liberal can believe that increasing taxes $1 trillion equals a "reduction in spending," and today's shameful budget speech shows what a fundamentally dishonest person Obama is.