Academic

PETER SUDERMAN: Obama?s Pledge Not To Raise Taxes: A Firm Commitment to Possibly Raising Taxes. ?

By Glenn Reynolds

PETER SUDERMAN: Obama’s Pledge Not To Raise Taxes: A Firm Commitment to Possibly Raising Taxes.

You might think that when an elected official makes a promise to avoid a certain policy (like tax hikes), then that policy would no longer be considered. In theory, that’s the whole point of promising not to do something?to definitively take that option off the table. But apparently a promise not to raise taxes on a particular group of people actually means…well, not much of anything at all.

Not that it matters considering that Obama has already broken his campaign tax pledges. That is, unless you take the administration’s more nuanced view of taxation, which, as Jacob Sullum describes it, comes down to the simple idea that “when the president does it, it’s not a tax.”

More like Nixon all the time.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on May 01, 2010 (boomark / email).