The study shows that only 2.5 percent of small business owners face the top two rates.”
~Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Watch the video above to see the latest Mitt Romney falsification. Politics is filled with misleading things … questionable truths. But – the Romney campaign thinks YOU are so stupid … that you’re not going to know they literally cropped out half of the things he said during his speech. That’s why you don’t see the video … just the audio.
Here’s what the ad has President Obama saying:
Let me tell you something <CROP> If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.
Now – studies have shown that only 2.5% of “small businesses” will actually be impacted by President Obama’s plan to allow the “tax cuts for the rich” to expire. So – why is the Republican party against it you ask?
Only 2.5% of small businesses are affected by Obama’s proposal but 100% of billionaires are affected. That means GOP donors are affected. And those are their real constituents.
Here is what President Obama actually said:
Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.
Of course – by “you didn’t build that” – he means … you didn’t build the roads and bridges or the entire system or the internet or R&D that allowed business to thrive. As in – we’re all in this together. Now – for people who pay attention … they’ll watch that video and think – Romney is an asshole or that’s just politics. And it is just politics … that’s how it works. But these ads are meant to sway just a small slice of the uninformed electorate. So many of the American people are like sheep; it’s like some people wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.
Greg Sargent adds HERE:
Romney supporters will respond that the parts of the speech that were included in the Web video are objectionable on their own. I don’t agree with that, but it’s a debatable point. However, there is no question that this edit is highly misleading. It deliberately removes multiple sentences about the broader theme of Obama’s speech that preceeded the “you didn’t build that” quote in order to deprive it of its actual meaning as Obama plainly intended that. And it creates the false impression of a seamless transition from the first sentences about successful business people into the key line about them — a recontextualization that turns it inot a direct insult.
This line is going to be a major target for the Romney campaign — similar to Obama’s 2008 remark about spreading the wealth — but in order to have maximum political value, it needs to be removed from context in a highly misleading way, which the Romney camp is happy to do. Don’t be surprised if this line is up in ads in the swing states within days, edited in just this fashion. If the larger context is supposedly no help to Obama, as Romney backers insist, then why the need to edit the quote this way?
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compares small business job growth under President Clinton who raised taxes on the wealthy and President Bush who lowered them on the wealthy HERE:
The arguments against allowing the high-end tax cuts to expire on schedule echo those made against President Clinton’s proposed 1993 tax increases, which set marginal rates at the levels to which they are set to return when the Bush rate cuts expire. Critics claimed at the time that those tax increases would seriously harm economic growth and even send the economy back into recession. As it turned out, job creation and economic growth proved significantly stronger following the 1993 tax increases than following the 2001 Bush tax cuts. Further, small businesses generated jobs at twice the rate during the Clinton years than they did under the Bush tax code (see Figure 1).
Very few small business owners face the top two tax rates. The Treasury study shows that only 2.5 percent of small business owners, and 7.9 percent of filers with any income from small businesses that employ people, face the top two tax rates. Only 0.5 percent of small business owners, and 3.3 percent of filers with any income from small businesses that employ people, make $1 million or more per year.
The CBPP points out that 82% of the “tax cuts for the rich” actually go to people making over $1 million a year:
Just like the GOP tends to hide behind the troops in order to fund it’s war projects … it’s using the notion of “small business” as a shield to justify why they are against seeing tax cuts on the rich expire. But make no mistake – it’s about the individuals that are funding their campaigns … their donors. Do not be confused. And the average American is too uninformed or busy to know the difference.
Bottom line – we’re sitting on a $1 trillion deficit fueled by the Bush era. The year Obama took over – he had two wars, 800k jobs a month were being lost …. economic crisis and with all of that he had to swim upstream against a Republican party whose sole goal was to defeat the President and his policies. And further cutting taxes on people who are already sitting on millions and billions in the bank leave only two possibilities – cuts to important programs like Medicare and Social Security or raising taxes on the middle class. There is no free lunch here. We have to make a choice for the kind of future America wants … richer rich people or a country that wants to fund investments in education and the like.
