Remember Joe the Plumber?
He was the blue-collar dude who confronted Barack Obama late in the 2008 campaign with this challenge: “Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?”
Nonsense, replied the candidate: “From 250 [thousand dollars a year] down, your taxes are going to stay the same.”
Indeed, he insisted, 95 percent of “working people” would see their taxes go down in his administration.
Well, think again.
A year into his presidency, Obama now says he’s “agnostic” on what was the principal plank in his economic platform: No tax hikes for individuals making $200,000 a year or less — or for households with a combined annual income under $250,000.
The president is about to appoint a task force (not another one!) to study reining in the national deficit — and, he says, “what I want to do is to be completely agnostic in terms of solutions.”
Meaning, says Obama, that he “can’t set the whole thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table.”
Including his once-sacred tax pledge.
This, just six months after White House spokesman Robert Gibbs flatly rejected a suggestion by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and senior economic adviser Lawrence Summers that Obama might be willing to go back on that pledge.
Now, it seems, he’s willing to consider anything — including tax hikes on the middle class — in order to deal with the massive deficit ($1.56 trillion projected for 2010) he helped create.
Everything, that is, but what he and the Congress should be moving toward — spending restraint.
In fact, says the president, “The notion that somehow we can just cut our way out of this problem is just not true.”
Well, cutting runaway government spending may not solve the problem — but it’s the best place to start.
After all, as Obama acknowledged, “There is just a mismatch between the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out.”
Yet the president seems to think that the right solution is to make sure that more money comes into the government’s coffers — by way of higher taxes.
He would do better to follow the example of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who yesterday declared a state of fiscal emergency across the Hudson and completely froze $1.6 billion in unspent government funds, including money for schools, higher education and hospitals.
That will set off howling, no doubt — but it will help close the Garden State’s $2.2 billion budget gap.
“Higher spending is the road to ruin,” Christie told Jersey’s Legislature. “Today, we come to terms with the fact that we cannot spend money on everything we want.”
Joe the Plumber knew that.
So does Barack Obama.
But he just doesn’t care.