Deja Vu--the Clinton middle class tax cuts

Obama says he will give tax cuts to 95% of the American people. We've heard it before. Bill Clinton said he was going to give the middle class tax cuts during the 1992 presidential campaign. (Obama doesn't seem to know that the poor don't pay income tax, but that's another blog.) It didn't take long for Clinton to change his mind--about a month, because The NYT called him on it on February 18, 1993, about a month after his inauguration.

"In selling his economic plan, President Clinton is gambling that voters never took seriously his campaign promise to lower the tax burden of the middle class and will respond favorably to an aggressive pitch based on equal measures of hope, fear and class revenge.

After months of polling and research, Mr. Clinton's top political advisers say they are convinced that middle-class voters will support higher taxes. The advisers say the voters will see the new taxes as the price of great improvements in Government service and as inflicting a just punishment on the rich who profited during the Reagan and Bush Administrations." Complete story

Apparently, the voters did forgive him, because they gave him another term (I'd learned my lesson by then and didn't vote for him in 1996). But the lesson of history is, don't believe any candidate when he/she promises to reduce your taxes. It's just campaign rhetoric. What's scary is, Obama has actually promised to raise taxes--but of course not for you and me, just on corporations and the rich. Yeah.