Hillary Watch: Intentional Deception and Distortion

Hillary sends Nevada Voters negative Obama mailer.

(click images to enlarge)
Hillary use this negative mailer in New Hampshire before the primary.

Obama campaign transcribed his response"

want to be clear about what [my] Social Security plan is, because so many people rely on Social Security....

We don't have an immediate problem, we have a long-term problem. We've got 78 million baby boomers who are set to retire and so we've got more retirees, fewer [inaudible]. If we don't do anything, then by about 2040, the benefits will have declined to where you're getting about 75 cents out of every dollar you were promised on Social Security. That is a problem. It has to be solved...

Now there's one more way of solving the problem. And that is raising the cap on the payroll tax. Now what that means is, currently, you only pay Social Security on the first $97,000 of income. Now it turns out that here in Nevada, 97% of the people in Nevada make $97,000 a year or less. So essentially, everybody except 3% -- if this was a random sample of Nevada, there are only about 3% of you who make more than that, everybody else, you gotta pay payroll tax on 100% of your income.

Now, what I've said is that what we should do is we should adjust the cap, so that billionaires like Warren Buffett are paying more, because right now they're paying a fraction of 1% of their income to payroll tax. And my answer is, that's not fair. Why would we have the wealthiest Americans pay such a smaller percentage of the payroll tax when everyone else is
paying basically 100%?

So I propose raising the cap. We might exempt middle class folks for maybe $97,000 for up to $200,000; there might be some exemptions, but those people are making over $200, $250,000, they can afford to pay a little more on payroll tax. So this is what I propose, this is what Senator Clinton is calling a trillion-dollar tax cut on hard-working Americans.

Hat Hip: Talking Point Memo