Please raise my taxes, ex-Google exec tells Obama

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AFP) ― A rich former Google executive pleaded with Barack Obama to raise his taxes Monday, boosting the U.S. leader’s push to get well off Americans to bankroll his $447 billion jobs plan.

Obama stormed through the American west on a three-day tour devoted to hammering Republicans and piling up cash for his 2012 reelection bid, which is overshadowed by 9.1 percent unemployment and a wobbling economy.

Former Google brand manager Doug Edwards became an instant media sensation when he joined billionaire investor Warren Buffett in calling for those who had done well in America to do more to help the struggling masses.

“I don’t have a job, (I) worked for a small startup down the street here that did quite well,” Edwards told Obama, at a Silicon Valley town-hall event on the jobs package sponsored by the LinkedIn social network. 

“I am unemployed by choice.” “My question is ― would you please raise my taxes?” Edwards said.

Edwards later told reporters that he had never met Obama, but was invited to the town hall event by a friend who had links to the Democratic Party.

He was at Google during heady expansion years between 1999 and 2005 and said he believed that Americans who could afford it should pay more money in capital gains taxes to help the less well off, and programs like infrastructure improvements.

Obama, who answered an hour of questions from a decidedly friendly crowd, told Edwards the two of them had become successful because “somebody invested in our education. Somebody built schools.”

“I appreciate your sentiment. I appreciate the fact that you recognize we’re in this thing together. We’re not on our own, and those of us who’ve been successful, we’ve always got to remember that.”

The president has proposed partly financing his jobs plan by raising taxes on the most well off Americans and closing corporate tax loopholes.

“Right now, we’ve got the lowest tax rates we’ve had since the 1950s. And some of the Republican proposals would take it back ― as a percentage of GDP ― back to where we were back in the 1920s.

“You can’t have a modern industrial economy like that.”

But Republicans counter that raising taxes in grim economic times would hamper growth and accuse the president of waging “class warfare” for political gain.

On Sunday, Obama warned that Republicans who have blocked his initiatives in Congress since grabbing control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 election, would “cripple” America if let back into the White House.

Obama is seeking to repair his own political prospects, dragged down by the economic malaise and a string of bruising battles with Republicans on Capitol Hill, 14 months before he faces disgruntled voters.

His new populist tone comes after repeated attempts to convince Republicans to join him to pass measures to heal the economy, a policy of conciliation which has dismayed some of his core political supporters.

The president is now making increasingly sharp comparisons between his policies and those of Republicans, who he says want to balance the budget by cutting social programs that have kept millions of Americans out of poverty.

The president later moved onto evening fundraising events in Los Angeles, a hotbed of well-heeled Democratic Party supporters.

At an event at the House of Blues theater in West Hollywood, a bearded man stood up at the front of the auditorium and started heckling Obama with religious rhetoric.

The man shouted “(The) Christian God is the one and only true living God, the creator of Heaven and the Universe. I love Jesus. Jesus Christ is God. Jesus Christ is the son of God.”

Obama halted his remarks and a crowd started to boo the man as he was hauled out of the auditorium by police and Secret Service agents, yelling “Jesus Christ is God. Barack Obama is the antichrist!”