6:46 p.m. | Updated Sarah Palin is in a fight with the facts — at least, with the facts as seen by PolitiFact, the fact-checking project of the St. Petersburg Times.
The writers at PoltiFact took issue with Ms. Palin’s recent assertion that Democrats are pushing the largest tax increase in U.S. history, rating it “pants on fire” wrong.
“It’s a tax increase of $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, and it will have an effect on every single American who pays an income tax,” Ms. Palin said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” when asked about the consequences of ending the Bush tax cuts for wealthiest Americans.
Democrats, PolitiFact was quick to note, are proposing ending the lower rates only for the top two percent of tax payers — individuals making more than $200,000 or couples making more than $250,000. Still, it’s a line of criticism echoed by other Republicans.
Ms. Palin disputed PolitiFact’s claim Thursday via Facebook, saying they were wrong because Democrats don’t actually have a tax plan.
“Unfortunately for PolitiFact, no such proposal exists,” she wrote. “Plan? What plan? There is no plan. All we have is smoke and mirrors based on an old Obama campaign pledge.”
For that, she earned a more mild rebuke: False.
Mr. Obama has laid his proposal out, at least twice, in the White House’s annual budget documents and key Democratic leaders have indicated that they are using his plan as a framework, PolitiFact explains.
Ms. Palin appeared to base her reasoning on the fact that if Congress does not act before Dec. 31 all of the Bush tax cuts will expire. That assumes that no compromise will emerge.
Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Thursday that he would be open to extending the tax cuts for the middle class permanently and for the wealthy until 2012.
If all of the Bush tax cuts were to expire Ms. Palin’s $3.8 trillion estimate is reasonably on target, PolitiFact reckons. But whether it would be the largest tax increase ever depends on how one measures.
It would amount to just above 2.2 percent of G.D.P. According to a Treasury Department study of tax increases and tax cuts between 1940 and 2006, that would be larger than the Reagan tax hike of 1982, which came to 1.23 percent of GDP. But it would be smaller than one of the tax increases passed during World War II — the Revenue Act of 1942, which is estimated at 5.04 percent of GDP.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated Sarah Palin’s assertion about Democrats’ tax policy: She recently asserted that Democrats are pushing the largest tax increase in U.S. history, not the largest tax cut.
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