A Taxing Time If Obama Wins

CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo lays out the Obama plan for your money if he’s elected president:

“He’s going to take the capital gains tax at 15 percent right now all the way up to 25 to 28 percent. . . . Sell anything, like a home or stocks, and make a profit . . . [almost] 30 percent of the profit will go to the government instead of 15. Right now [the top income tax rate] is 35 percent, Obama wants to take that to 39 percent . . . We’re talking about people who make over $200,000. That’s not rich. So it’s actually going to impact more people than you may think.”

And then there’s his promise of a windfall profits tax as dicussed by Bartiromo and other here.

Says one of the analysts, Ron Insana, with whom she speaks:

“We’ve seen this happen before during the last oil price shock in the 1970s and it’s not a terribly efficient way to address some of the problems that we’re seeing in the energy sector. This is a multifaceted extremely complex problem that isn’t going to be solved by taxing oil companies….With respect to raising taxes at any time, whether you’re taxing the rich or raising capital gain, dividend taxes, I think it’s counterintuitive that any one of those steps would be helpful to the U.S. economy and quite detrimental given the load that everyone is carrying at the moment.”

The more I hear about Obama’s plans the more I realize that John McCain may be right – it appears he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second term. And we all know what Americans did about that.

Nothing like raising taxes during a slowing economy to remind us of the “joy” of the blessedly short Carter era.

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