Obama finally admits the truth

For the longest time, president Obama has been pushing a tax increase in the "rich" as a matter of fairness. We have been told repeatedly that this will not affect job creation since a bit more tax on the wealthy will not matter. Yesterday, the truth came out. In a congressional hearing, Treasury Secretary Geithner admitted that raising taxes on those above $250,000 would actually increse taxes rather dramatically for small businesses that get taxed through individual income taxes of the owners. He said that raising taxes on this group that create about two thirds of all jobs in this country was needed so that the government would not have to give up any of its current programs. Here is a quote from the CNS story:

"When Ellmers finally told Geithner that “the point is we need jobs,” he responded that the administration felt it had “no alternative” but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”—including federal education spending."

In the last forty years, federal education spending has risen by hundreds of billions of dollars yet the students do worse on achievement tests than they did at the earlier date. Indeed, the cities with the highest expenditures per pupil do significantly worse than those which spend less. The truth is that programs which encourage various political or ideological agendas do not help improve the quality of the students. Programs that give teachers higher pay and benefits do not improve the quality of the education. Programs that layer federal restrictions on local school boards do not improve the quality of the education. In short, were the Department of Education to be replaced with block grants to localities totaling 50% of the current budget of the Department, there would be a substantial savings and probably an improvement in the end product since the federal meddling and all the associated costs would be gone.

The Obamacrats have a lot of nerve claiming that the reason to tax small business and kill jobs is to improve education. They do not have a clue how to improve education.