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Bill Clinton Undercuts Obama, Calls for Middle Class Tax Increase

By Rush Limbaugh | May 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

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RUSH: And our old buddy Bill Clinton, who, by the way, Bill Clinton’s back, and Bill Clinton’s back calling for tax increases on the middle class, ladies and gentlemen. It’s right here in The Politico.

“Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s goal of hiking taxes on the rich alone is not enough to solve the country’s fiscal woes and suggested that middle class Americans must also eventually contribute more.” (imitating Clinton) “Look, this is just me now. I’m not speaking for the White House. I think you could tax me, you know, Hillary and I, we’re rich now, and I think you could tax me at a hundred percent and you wouldn’t balance that old budget. The fact of the matter is you could tax me, you could tax Limbaugh, you could tax O’Reilly, you could tax everybody out there, you could tax me and Hillary, and you still wouldn’t balance the budget. We are all gonna have to contribute to this. And if middle-class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth in the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates of when I was president.”

Now, is this guy doing Obama any favors here? Bill Clinton comes out, calls for tax increases on the middle class. Let’s take the rates back to when he was president. I mean what is Obama doing? Obama’s out there on this class envy tour trying to make everybody believe that the reason we have an economic problem is because we have rich people in the first place. The second thing is, to solve it we’ve gotta tax ’em, we gotta tax that 1%. They are the problem.

Here comes our old buddy Bill Clinton. (imitating Clinton) “Well, you know, this is just me speaking. I mean, I’m not speaking for the White House, but I’m telling you, you could tax me, you could take everything I’ve got and that’s not gonna balance the budget. You can tax all the rich people I know, you could tax Harvey Weinstein, you could tax Spielberg, every one of these people. You could tax Will Smith and you’re still not gonna balance the budget.” I mean, that is the exact opposite message Obama wants, is it not?

And then to close it out by saying, “I think the middle class, if they had some income, they wouldn’t object to paying taxes.” If they had some income. If we had some growth to the economy, the middle class wouldn’t mind. Obama’s out there trying to tell the middle class they’re not gonna pay anything. They’re gonna get and get. They’re gonna have nothing but benefits. That’s Obama’s message. Here comes old Bill. “Hey, you can tax me all you want, ain’t gonna close the budget.” In other words, “You know what? Obama doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s telling you that he can raise taxes on the rich, but it ain’t gonna fix the budget. He’s gonna have to raise taxes on you.” The thing is, Clinton’s more right than he’s wrong here. That’s the irony here is that Clinton’s exactly right. You could take everything the rich have and you wouldn’t balance the budget, ever, and if you took everything the rich have, you can only do it once. By definition, they’ve got no more.

“Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, but they will earn it next year.” Why, Mr. New Castrati, if you take everything they’ve got, why go earn any more of it if it’s all gonna be taken? You can only take it one time. Still don’t balance the budget. We gotta raise taxes on the middle class. And we got it in Ed Klein’s book, Bill wants Hillary to run for president. He wants Hillary back in there. He wants back in there. The Politico says here, “The former president’s remarks about his own tax rate seemed to be a reference to Obama’s ‘Buffett Rule,’ which proposes higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Clinton asserted that when he was at the White House, ‘very few people’ thought they were being overtaxed.” (laughing) I know it’s absolutely ridiculous. Clinton is the one who called Obama an amateur, and that’s
the title of Klein’s book.

It was Clinton that called Obama an amateur. So now he’s out there attacking the Buffett Rule. He’s attacking Obama’s class envy. He’s telling the middle class that he knows that they wouldn’t object to a tax increase if they had any income. Clinton said, “Look, we can’t be in a position here where one of the negotiating partners says that that’s not negotiable. I mean, not only will we not raise taxes, we want the Bush tax cuts and we want more tax cuts and we want the right to disregard what the CBO says our budget — you can’t do that. It’s hard to have a deal if there’s no arbiter.” Looks to me like — and of course, I could be wrong — it looks to me like Clinton seems to differ on just about every Obama policy. And yet he’s out there campaigning for him. We got Clinton saying this. Of course you don’t need to hear Clinton say it; you just heard me do it.

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