Remember That Promise Not To Raise Taxes On The Non-Rich?

Barack Obama sure doesn't. Or, if he does, he sure doesn't care. Just to refresh your memory, this is but one of the many times he made this promise:

That was sooooo way back then. This is now:

President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Agnostic? Looking at the definition, that doesn't really even make sense. But, anyway, it seems clear that he's putting tax hikes for the non-rich -- people making less than $250,00 a year -- explicitly back on the table.

Obama’s economic policies have had the effect that we predicted they would during the campaign. The White House sees trillion-plus budget deficits for most of the next ten years, thanks to massively expanding federal budgets and the drag they put on economic growth. Either Obama has to drastically reduce federal spending and the intrusion it creates in American lives, or he has to hike taxes in a broad manner to generate enough income to offset the spending. Taxing just the upper 5% isn’t an option.

Unfortunately, neither is reining in a federal budget that Democrats have already increased over a trillion dollars since taking control of Congress in 2006. They seem incapable of cutting spending, or even halting the increase of spending. Instead, they will suck more capital out of the private sector as they create a massive nanny-state system that has already failed in Europe.

Obama fooled middle-class voters into supporting him in 2008 with this pledge. Once it expires, he’s left with nothing but the reality of being another Leftist idealogue with a penchant for top-down government control.

I'd say that about covers it. This is the kind of thing that will really cost him at the ballot box. No one accepts being lied to very easily, and this is a key statement of Obama's throughout the campaign. It's pretty damned easy to verify this one, too, and millions of Americans are going to be doing just that come November.

As Victor Davis Hanson puts it:

There was no place in his promised new politics for lobbyists and Chicago tactics. After a single year of governance, there is now scarcely a single issue that Obama & Co. have not backtracked on, flip-flopped, redefined, or quietly dropped — mostly matters that were once demagogued to score political points. At some point — I think it was around mid-January — the public collectively shrugged and concluded of Obama, “I don’t trust anything that this guy says.” And when that happens in American politics, it is almost impossible to restore any modicum of credibility.

America's earliest lame duck? You betcha'.

There's my two cents.