Do Democrats have a plan to extend Bush tax cuts?
On Wedneday, we published a fact-check of comments Sarah Palin made on Fox News Sunday. She was asked about Democratic plans to raise taxes on the wealthy.
She said their plan would result in the “largest tax increase in history.” We examined the Democratic plan and found tax increases for the wealthy weren’t nearly the largest tax increase in history. Because she distorted her opponents’ plans so badly, we rated that statement Pants on Fire.
She didn’t like our rating, and wrote an extensive response via Facebook. She said we went off track because the Democrats don’t really have a tax plan.
“Unfortunately for PolitiFact, no such proposal exists. … Plan? What plan? There is no plan. All we have is smoke and mirrors based on an old Obama campaign pledge that if elected, he would exempt families making less than $250,000 a year from ‘any form of tax increases.’ …
“To prevent PolitiFact from making similar mistakes in future, it would be helpful if the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership finally mustered the courage to table their plans to let the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire. Mr. President, publish your proposals, and we’ll duke it out. You can argue in favor of a multi-trillion dollar tax hike in an age of economic uncertainty and mass unemployment, and we’ll argue for fiscal sanity combined with serious spending cuts.”
Actually, President Obama has proposed formal plans to leave tax rates in place for the middle class while raising taxes on the wealthy — for example, on pages 39 and 164 of his 2011 budget. We also re-capped Obama’s history on tax increases. We rated Palin’s latest statement False.
You can see every fact-check we’ve reported about Sarah Palin on Palin’s PolitiFact page.
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