On Sunday President Obama set a record by visiting five talk shows to push his proposed health care overhaul. After an initial bump in support for his plan following his address to Congress in early September fifty-six percent of voters nationwide now oppose the rationed health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. An NBC poll shows that 54 percent of Americans are more worried about government control of health care than they are worried about reform not going far enough. And 66 percent of doctors reject the democratic bill to overhaul the health care system. These troubling numbers prompted the president to take his message of universal health care to the top Sunday morning talk shows with the exception of FOX News Sunday which he decided to boycott. He will follow this with an appearance on Jay Leno on Monday night. The president is throwing his full political weight behind an unpopular plan that will radically change the American health care system. Barack Obama decided this past week that it's not the plan that he's been pushing for months that's at fault. It's the American public who are at fault for not understanding the plan.
And so Barack Obama made the circuit on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the president brought nothing new to the table and his appearances only brought more attention to his unrealistic interpretation of the proposal. On "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos Obama insisted that his plan requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don't would not amount to a backhanded tax increase. When Stephanopoulos argued that this was a tax increase and used Merriam Webster's Dictionary to back up his point the president actually challenged the definition of "tax."
STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.
OBAMA: No. That's not true, George. The… ?for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that… right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I'm not covering all the costs.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy...
OBAMA: No, but… but, George, you… you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase. Any...
STEPHANOPOULOS: I... I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam Webster's Dictionary: Tax…"a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes."
OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the… definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the... dictionary to check on the definition...
That won't win over any of the president's critics. It's one thing to argue with a talk show host. It's another to argue with the dictionary.
During his interview on "Face the Nation" President Obama told Bob Schieffer that there would be no additional tax on people making less than $250,000 a year. Obama said he was keeping his pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class despite the fact that his plan would cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years. Obama said this could be achieved from savings within the current system. But this isn't what his democratic colleagues are saying. Last week Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D- West Virginia) ripped into the democrat's health-care bill saying that a lot of middle class workers, like the coal miners in his state, will end up facing "a big, big tax." How big of a tax? CNS News reported in July that democrats are planning to increase income taxes by $540 billion.
Despite a still-lagging U.S. economy and rising unemployment rate, House Democrats announced late yesterday that they will seek a massive increase in federal income taxes to help pay for the national health-care reform proposal that President Obama is urging Congress to enact this summer.
House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.)revealed late Friday afternoon that House Democrats will seek to increase income taxes by $540 billion.
The move, which had been discussed earlier in the week by House Democrats, broke in an Associated Press story that was published at 4:14 PM Eastern Daylight time on Friday afternoon (or 8:14 PM Greenwich Mean Time)
Maybe Obama missed that report too, just like the ACORN scandal. If President Obama really wanted to change minds on his health care plan he could be more honest with the American public or bring something new to the table. Instead he came out today and misrepresented the facts and argued with dictionaries. That won’t change any hearts and minds but it will make the president look foolish.
Jim Hoft's Bio
Jim Hoft is the proprietor of Gateway Pundit , a blog named one of the top 100 collective news resources at Memeorandum and listed as one of the top 100 blogs in a Carnegie Mellon University study. A million readers come to Gateway Pundit each month to read stories and news that are frequently missed by mainstream media outlets.
Posted
09-22-2009 12:01 AM
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