Obama's "Incredible Shrinking Tax Cut"

Barack Obama's promise of a tax cut and the threshold of when additional taxes kick in seems to be shrinking like a cube of ice in a swimming pool.

As Deroy Murdock at the Seattle Post Intelligencer points out:

Obama would stuff a pillow over the face of America's bedridden economy by boosting capital gains and dividend taxes by a third, from 15 percent to 20 percent. He would hike top income tax rates from 33 percent and 35 percent to 36 percent and 39.6 percent. He also would maintain the 35 percent corporate tax and a 45 percent inheritance tax on estates above $3.5 million.

Obama promises "tax cuts" to 95 percent of Americans, even though 44 percent of filers pay $0 in income taxes. A shifting target of taxpayers would finance these transfer payments.

"If you make $250,000 a year or less, we will not raise your taxes," Obama declared last July 8. "We will cut your taxes."

On Oct. 25, Obama's threshold slipped. "If you have a job, pay taxes and make less than $200,000 a year, you'll get a tax cut," he said in a commercial.

VP nominee Joe Biden told Scranton's WNEP Monday that tax cuts "should go to middle class people -- people making under $150,000 a year."

"It's interesting how their definition of rich has a way of creeping down," McCain said Tuesday in Pennsylvania.

Today, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and an Obama backer, said the ceiling is now $120,000 in a phone-in radio interview with KOA in Denver!

What's it going to be by Election Day? $40,000?

UPDATE: Fox News quoted Richardson:

The latest hiccup in the campaign message came Friday morning on KOA-AM, when New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pegged the middle class as those making $120,000 and under.

"What Obama wants to do is he is basically looking at $120,000 and under among those that are in the middle class, and there is a tax cut for those," Richardson said in the interview, according to a clip posted on YouTube.