Obama and Clinton Attack the Middle Class
President Obama and Hillary Clinton constantly talk about their efforts to help the middle class. Yet their policies often directly attack middle-income earners. Consider two recent examples: Obama’s proposal to impose a $10 per barrel levy on oil, and Clinton’s boast that she would drastically reduce the use of coal for energy.
Obama calls his proposal a “fee” under the pretext that he is collecting the money from oil companies. Don’t be fooled. Corporate taxes are inevitably passed along to consumers. So we’ll all feel this new fee at the pump.
Gasoline is already one of the nation’s most heavily taxed consumer products. On top of the federal government’s current take of 18.4 cents a gallon, state gasoline taxes range from a high of about 50 cents per gallon in Pennsylvania to a low of 12.25 cents in Alaska. Everyone who drives pays those taxes, regardless of how poor they are.
Since 42 gallons of gas can be refined from one barrel of oil, the president’s $10-a-barrel tax works out to about 25 cents per gallon. So all told, those who live in states with high gas taxes could end up paying $1.00 per gallon just in taxes.
American households use on average about 1,000 gallons of gas per year. So Obama’s oil tax would cost the average family an extra $250 yearly — a hit much harder on low- and middle-income workers than the upper class.
A tax is called regressive if it hits the poor the hardest. Liberals have created a cottage industry attacking any tax they believe to be regressive — unless, apparently, Obama is the one proposing it.
Congress understands this fact, and so left out the tax in the latest transportation budget. But the White House has now threatened to veto any such bill that fails to include this $10-a-barrel levy.
Obama’s oil tax will cost some Americans their jobs — but not nearly as many as Clinton’s plan.
“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton told a CNN Town hall. And she didn’t stop with coal, “Now we gotta move away from coal — and all the other fossil fuels.”
Clinton’s plan is a blatant attack on the middle class. The oil and natural gas industry supports about 8.4 million full- and part-time jobs. The vast majority of these jobs pay middle- to upper-middle income wages.
A few days after her blunder, she went to West Virginia to try and clean up her mess. People will have to decide for themselves whether this statement does the job: “I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time.”
She also says she wants to provide unemployed coal workers with health care benefits and let them keep whatever pensions they had. Of course, if she weren’t putting them out of a job, the federal government wouldn’t need to do that. And she claims that she will be replacing their fossil fuel jobs with clean energy jobs. Yes, West Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
If Obama and Clinton actually worried about the middle class, they would drop their plans and get the government out of the business of choosing energy winners and loser. Because the ultimate losers will be the middle class.
By Merrill Matthews
Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas.