RNC Chairman Michael Steele on Obamacare: "taxes are going to go up for the middle class because they have to"

RNC Chairman Michael Steele told CBS News’ Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation this Sunday, that “it’s just not believable” Obamacare won't raise taxes on the middle class. Steele, also, does a great job of defending the Republican position on health care reform.



From the video:

STEELE: The American people will walk away from this weekend’s series of interviews — I think, tomorrow night, with Letterman or whatever — and they’ll say to themselves, “So, what’s changed?”

And this is not, I think, very helpful to the president right now. He’s got to get the American people behind him. And when he says stuff like you he can do — you laid out the litany of things that, you know, he wants to get accomplished. And he says, yes, we can still do all of that.

Without raising taxes? Without creating the deficit — or increasing it? It’s just not believable.

And I think it may have nice to do the interviews, but I don’t think it advanced the debate on health care that much.

SCHIEFFER: So you think he is going to raise taxes?

STEELE: He has to. How else do you pay for it?

I mean, you know, all this cutting efficiencies — I mean, creating efficiencies and cutting costs within various programs — I mean, Washington’s been saying that for generations. I mean, that’s just not the business of government. It doesn’t do that.

And I don’t think that’s going to — particularly with something as mammoth as health care, that you’re going to be able to go on and create $1 trillion worth of savings in the health care system.

So those dollars have to come from some place. Whether you’re talking the Baucus bill; whether you’re talking the House bill, H.R. 3200, or whatever bill the administration finally settles on, taxes are going to go up for the middle class because they have to. That’s the only way you pay for this.