"Releasing information on a Friday afternoon is traditionally a way to reduce the amount of media exposure."
Bush 41: ‘Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?’
Former President George H.W. Bush, who famously said “Read my lips: no new taxes” at the 1988 Republican National Convention before going on to raise taxes during his presidency, does not think highly of pledges that keep lawmakers from hiking rates. He gave an interview to Parade magazine in which he knocks Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, whose organization has convinced hundreds of policymakers and candidates to sign a pledge promising never to raise rates.
What do you think about requiring lawmakers to make pledges against raising taxes?
As an experiment, Yahoo News turned to the Obama campaign’s Buffett Rule calculator and located the annual salary in 2011 of the president’s personal secretary, Anita Decker Breckenridge, on the White House’s public report on pay in the West Wing. The calculator is an oversimplified tool, but it reported that married filers with that income would typically pay an effective rate of 20.9 percent (a hair above Obama’s 20.5 percent), while filers married with children would pay 17.6 percent (somewhat less than the married-with-children president).
While we know Breckenridge is married, without data like her husband’s income, the calculator’s information is chiefly for entertainment purposes. Putting the Obamas’ information into the calculator generates the message “tax rates at the salary you entered vary significantly based on the level and nature of investment income, as well as other factors.”
