Yesterday, Obama signaled he may "defer" his tax-hiking economic proposals because he knew it could hurt the economy. This is the intro and his own statement from a segment on CNBC yesterday:
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CNBC'S JOHN HARWOOD: I found this fascinating, Maria, that on the issue of taxes, he looked to insulate himself by saying that if, in fact, economic conditions justify the fact that it might harm the economy, he might be willing to hold off some of his tax increases when he takes office in January. Let's take a listen to Barack Obama.Today, Obama was asked about his "vetter" Jim Johnson. ABC News' Sunlen Miller asked Obama how he could "rail against Countrywide Financial Corp as an example of insiders and today's economy while your VP search is headed by someone who got questionable loans from Countrywide?"
OBAMA: Some of those, you could possibly defer. But I think the basic principle of restoring fairness to our economy and encouraging bottom-up economic growth is important. So here's what we know: We know that over the last decade or so, that more than half of the economic growth has been captured by the top one percent of U.S. citizens. That means the other 99 percent have seen their effective incomes go down. That is not a recipe for long- term economic growth.
Obama's answer?
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"These aren’t folks who are working for me," Obama said. "They're not people you know who I have assigned to a job in a future administration and, you know, ultimately my assumption is that, you know, this is a discreet task that they're going to performing for me over the next two months."
That's an interesting standard. I suppose Rev. Wright, Ayers, Dohn, Rezko, etc didn't matter because he wasn't paying them either?!?
Update: Video from Obama's presser w/ Johnson question.
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