PolitiFact: Group inflates number of tax increases proposed by Obama

“Obama has proposed 442 tax hikes since taking office,” Americans for Tax Reform said in an April 14 press release.

The report, divided into sections for each fiscal year’s budget from 2010 to 2015, is based on an analysis of the budgets the Obama administration has proposed since taking the White House.

Americans for Tax Reform, headed by Grover Norquist, is well known for opposing tax increases. The group promotes a famous pledge that says politicians will oppose “any and all efforts” to increase income taxes and will also oppose “any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” That means they don’t support any measure that brings more revenue into the government.

We’ve tracked Obama’s campaign promises on taxes, and while he has definitely proposed new taxes, we were suspicious that it was 442 separate tax increases.

So we decided to put Americans for Tax Reform’s number to our Truth-O-Meter.

The list

We started out with a close examination of the list in the group’s 15-page press release.

We found plenty of measures on the list that would increase taxes. One example: Obama’s pledge to impose a so-called “Buffett Rule,” which would set a minimum tax rate of about 30 percent on millionaires.

Also included on the list are several tax increases on the oil and gas industry, either by eliminating existing credits for oil companies or through entirely new taxes, another pledge Obama made during his presidential campaigns.

Many items on the list, though, struck us as either double-counted or not a tax at all. Here’s a summary of problems we found:

The list counts the same proposals multiple times. Americans for Tax Reform listed a measure each time it appeared in one of Obama's budgets. As a result, 276 of the proposals on the list have at least one match somewhere else in the document. (We didn't include proposals that have a similar but not identical wording to others on the list.)

Obama did propose these measures multiple times, but it is misleading to count each time he included a measure in his budget as a newly proposed tax increase.

For example, Obama has long proposed ending a special tax category, known as “carried interest,” that allows hedge fund managers and other financial investors to claim lower tax rates than ordinary workers. But Congress has never signed off on getting rid of the special category. Americans for Tax Reform counts Obama’s idea four times on its list because it has appeared in four budget proposals. But it’s really the same proposal.

Removing duplicates eliminates about 159 of the proposals, cutting the total down to 283 proposed tax increases.

Americans for Tax Reform said it didn’t see these as duplicates, since Obama specifically proposed them each year in his budgets.

“If President Obama proposes tax increases several times in several different budgets, he deserves full credit for doing so,” Ryan Ellis, the group’s tax policy director, said via email.

Some items aren't tax increases. We noticed that the list includes several administrative changes to the tax code that aren't tax increases. Here are a few examples:

Oddly, we found that a few measures that were actually tax decreases, such as the proposal from the president’s 2015 budget to eliminate the telephone excise tax.

We flagged 34 of the proposals on the list as ones that either wouldn’t raise taxes or would only do so through a penalty for failing to comply with the proposal.

Americans for Tax Reform agreed that four of the items we found were not tax increases, including the repeal of the telephone excise tax. Ellis said it would adjust its total accordingly.

But it did feel that 11 items, including indexing tax penalties for inflation, were tax increases because they would increase revenue to the government. The other items “fall into an area where reasonable minds can draw different conclusions,” Ellis said.

The list also failed to account for other tax cuts that are part of Obama’s record, including nearly $220 billion in tax cuts that were part of the federal stimulus.

We ran our findings by Eric Toder, a co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and an expert on federal tax policy. He said it wasn’t useful to count tax proposals without any consideration for what’s in the proposal.

“This whole matter of the number of tax hikes he proposed is silly,” Toder said via email. “If someone raised my taxes 442 times by 1 cent each time or one time by $100,000, I think I would prefer the former to the latter.”

Our ruling

Americans for Tax Reform said that “Obama has proposed 442 tax hikes since taking office.”

While the list accompanying the claim does contain some proposals that would have increased taxes, it overstates the total number by a significant amount. Our analysis suggests about 200 items should be knocked off this list because it includes the same items Obama proposed in multiple budgets and some proposals that cannot be considered tax increases. We rate this Mostly False.