Wow, Grover Gets It Wrong

I found this Americans for Tax Reform piece via Scaife's own Newsmax.

For those of you who don't yet know Grover Norquist is quite important in Republican circles where his anti-tax pledge, is quite popular.  According to the Washington Times:

All but four of the 242 House Republicans, and 41 out of the 47 Senate Republicans, have signed Mr. Norquist's "Taxpayer Protection Pledge."

That somewhere around 96% of all Congressional Republicans.  That's alot of Elephant!

So it's pretty amazing when he gets something really, really terribly wrong. Take a look at his first two paragraphs of his ATR piece, published Friday, December 9:

The holidays are a season for giving and spending time with loved ones. However, this year taxpayers will be adding Uncle Sam to their Christmas list. Of an identified $10.72 billion of holiday spending, 43.36 percent of the price Americans pay to celebrate Christmas is due to government taxes, fees and other costs.

This season, not even Christmas trees are safe from the government grinch. The Obama Administration has applied a 15 cent tax on each Christmas tree sold, meaning government now composes 31.19 percent of the price of an average 40 dollar Christmas tree. While implementation of the tax has been delayed, this is a particularly naughty idea to fuel increased government spending. For the $1.15 billion in sales generated by the Christmas tree industry employing over 100,000 workers, the Christmas tax is another measure threatening Americans jobs—so much for yuletide cheer. [emphasis added]

And when did this delay occur?  At least a month ago.  Take a look at what we wrote on November 12.  In that post we linked to this piece by Jake Tapper from November 9::

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is going to delay implementation and revisit a proposed new 15 cent fee on fresh-cut Christmas trees, sources tell ABC News. The fee, requested by the National Christmas Tree Association in 2009, was first announced in the Federal Registry yesterday and has generated criticism of President Obama from conservative media outlets.

So Norquist knew it was delayed but he seems to have missed all the other details revolving around the fee - like how it was requested by the NCTA or how the fee is generated by the growers and won't impact the cost of the trees or how the money won't go into any guv'ment coffers as it'll be used by the association to promote fresh cut Christmas trees.

For someone supposed to be real smart on tax policy (or at least well informed) he simply failed on this one.

All this was in the news a month ago.  Why doesn't Grover Norquist know about it?  Or perhaps he does and he doesn't want you to know about it.  Nothing like letting the facts get in the way of a good "Obama Hates Christmas" smear.

You decide.