On today’s Your World show, Grover Norquist fearmongered, spun and misinformed about President-elect Joe Biden’s tax plan if Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win the U.S. Senate seats in next week’s Georgia runoffs. Host Sandra Smith helped validate the falsehoods.
In her introduction, Smith set the stage with her own scare tactics about the runoff, on which control of the Senate, along with much of Biden’s power to enact his agenda, depend:
SMITH: Gas taxes, income taxes, 401(k) taxes, you name it. Grover Norquist is warning Democrats will be hiking it if they win those two Georgia Senate seats.
FACT CHECK: In an article called, “Trump Tax Cuts Helped Billionaires Pay Less Taxes Than The Working Class In 2018,” Forbes reported that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts helped the 400 wealthiest people to pay a lower tax rate than any other group. Furthermore, Biden plans to raise taxes only for those making more than $400,000 a year. He gives tax breaks to ordinary Americans.
Rather than tell the real story of the two tax plans, Norquist tried to scare viewers with distortions:
NORQUIST: When the Republican tax cut passed, the median income family of four got a $2000 tax cut. So, as Biden, his vice president have said, and both of those liberal Democrats running for Georgia Senate seats, they’ve said they’re going to abolish the Trump tax cut, the Republican tax cut day one. That’s a $2000 increase on the average family of four on day one.
Remember they also support a tax on energy, a gasoline tax, a carbon tax. That will increase the cost of buying gasoline to fill up your tank another ten dollars, and they put it on automatic pilot, it goes up 5% a year every year out into the future. So it’s not just a one-time gas tax and a tax on home heating oil, a tax on your electricity, a tax on everything that gets shipped to you by truck or by train, that goes up year after year.
In addition, they want to bring back some of the Obamacare taxes. Remember the Obama penalty tax? If you didn’t buy Obamacare, it was a $700 tax on a person, $2000 on a family. Five million Americans were hit by that, maybe 100,000 in Georgia. Republicans took that tax to zero, Biden has repeadly said he would bring that back. Three quarters of the people who pay that tax earn less than $50,000 a year.
FACT CHECK: Biden’s Obamacare penalty is an inducement for Americans to get affordable health insurance via the Affordable Care Act, which Norquist is wants to get rid of altogether. Not mentioned was that Biden's plan caps individual spending for insurance at 8.5% of their income. Obamacare capped premiums at 10%.
It’s true Biden supports a carbon tax. But he also provides “clean energy” tax breaks. Kiplinger reports, “His ‘Clean Energy Revolution’ would be paid for by restoring the full electric vehicle tax credit (while aiming it at middle-class consumers); pushing tax breaks for energy efficiency in the homes and other buildings; and increasing tax incentives for carbon capture, use and storage.
But host Sandra Smith responded to Norquist's load of BS by saying, “Important stuff” and “Got it.” She described Norquist’s group as “the non-partisan Americans for Tax Reform” without noting it’s a conservative-allied group.
Norquist went on to claim Georgians will vote “to raise their own taxes” if they vote for Warnock and Ossoff in the runoffs next week.
You can watch Fox try to frighten viewers into voting Republican from the December 29, 2020 Your World.
That “average family” standard he’s touting is a deliberately misleading one. Because it’s not a measure of working class families (who only saw savings of $5 to $10 per week from the meager provisions for them in the Tax Transfer), the way he’s claiming it is. It’s actually a standard that includes the HUGE cuts that were given to extremely wealthy families, corporations and business owners. It includes the big tax cut for everyone earning over $415,000 per year. It includes the HUGE cut in the amount of inheritance taxes the uber-rich pay, in that they each can now gift over $11.5 million per heir and a married wealthy couple could gift over $23 million per heir – all tax free, where the numbers were less than half of that in 2016.
Let’s also not forget that the Tax Transfer also erased nearly all the deductions that Middle Class Employees formerly had available to them, by drastically reducing the State/Local Tax allowance (which thus means that those Employees have been getting double taxed on tens of thousands of dollars every year), and by eliminating pretty much everything else they could deduct short of a restricted mortgage amount and for charity. (The supposedly “doubled” standard deduction actually just added in the Individual Exemption that used to available to everyone and took that away from anyone who itemizes)
When the overall average between a working class family with an income of $30K per year and a super-rich family with income in the tens of millions per year is run, then yes, the “average” between them is a number where it looks like a savings of 2K per year. If you took out the super-rich from that averaging equation, you’d find that actually there wasn’t any real savings and that, again, for Middle Class Employees, this meant a massive skyrocket.
What Norquist is really saying here is that the super-wealthy will be seeing an increase in their taxes, and he believes that the viewers are uninformed enough to believe that this somehow applies to an average American family.
It’s time to start taxing corporations’ profits and closing loopholes for billionaires — THEN we can lower taxes on people making $40k/yr.
F-in’ muppet Grover… Not a peep when tRump ran up trillions in debt, but now you’re back on the scene. Pathetic…
