McCain Camp Blasts Obama on Taxes, Recycles False Info
After a pair of Sen. Barack Obama's advisers published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today clarifying the presumed Democratic nominee's tax policy, the McCain campaign responded with its first conference call with reporters this week. During the call, several of Sen. John McCain's surrogates -- including advisers Carly Fiorina and Doug Holtz-Eakin, as well as Stanford University economics professor John Taylor -- blasted Obama for shifting his position on payroll taxes. The Obama campaign today signaled a willingness to wait a decade before lifting the current $250,000 ceiling on the Social Security payroll tax. Here's what Fiorina said:
"Barack Obama has also been quoted as saying he would perhaps delay his payroll tax increase if he thought it would harm people in the current economy. In his discussion now about delaying it for 10 years suggests to me that his economic advisers have told him that increasing the payroll tax is actually not good to do in a weak economy….The reality is that if an increase in the payroll tax is not good now, it’s not good ever. I don’t know how he could predict the state of the economy ten years from now."
Fiorina also repeated -- and embellished -- a long-debunked claim about the Illinois senator's voting record on taxes:
"The reality of Barack Obama’s record is the following: He has voted to raise taxes 94 times in his short time as a senator."
In the past, the charge has usually been more carefully-worded -- that Obama has voted for higher taxes 94 times. In July, FactCheck.org, the non-partisan fact-checking Website from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, released a report taking issue with the veracity of this claim:
After looking at every one of the 94 votes that the RNC includes in its tally, we find:
23 were for measures that would have produced no tax increase at all; they were against proposed tax cuts.
Seven of the votes were in favor of measures that would have lowered taxes for many, while raising them on a relative few, either corporations or affluent individuals.
11 votes the GOP is counting would have increased taxes on those making more than $1 million a year – in order to fund programs such as Head Start and school nutrition programs, or veterans’ health care.
The GOP sometimes counted two, three and even four votes on the same measure. We found their tally included a total of 17 votes on seven measures, effectively padding their total by 10.
The majority of the 94 votes – 53, including some mentioned above – were on budget measures, not tax bills, and would not have resulted in any tax change. Four other votes were non-binding motions related to conference report negotiations.
Of course, Fiorina took the charge one step further and suggested Obama actually voted 94 times to increase taxes, which is indefensible based on the fact that FactCheck.org already discredited this more cautious claim. She also repeated the discredited attack that Obama "voted to raise taxes on people making as little as $42,000 a year." As FactCheck.org previously reported, the vote in question was on a non-binding budget resolution that could not have resulted in higher taxes. Like a zombie, a seemingly-dead false claim lives on.
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