A campaign promise by President Feckless, that is.

During the 2008 campaign he said this,

“I can make a firm pledge,” Obama said in 2008. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax. Not your payroll tax. Not your capital gains taxes. Not any of your taxes.”

Remember? Apparently some people believed him, I was not one of them. Truthfully I thought everything he said was a lie, except when he talked about radically changing the country. Not in a direction I’d like, but I think he means to try.

Now there is this,

In an interview this week with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the president said he no longer ruled out tax hikes on those making less than $250,000 a year. “What I can’t do is set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” he said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon you can’t solve the problem.”

So instead of cutting taxes, opening markets through free trade and scrapping the failed 2009 stimulus package before the last $500 million gets squandered, he’ll probably end up squeezing the middle class in exactly the way he said he wouldn’t.

Tax hikes at the $250,000 mark not only hurt high-achievers. They paint bull’s-eyes on the small businesses Obama says he wants to help. Some 21 million sole-proprietor businesses will get socked with such an increase, their money expropriated so the government can route it back to them in new bank lending schemes.

Now, this is no doubt a trial balloon to see how popular it is. Which my guess is will be not very. Plus he has to get his tax hike through a decidedly nervous Democratically controlled House and Senate. John Murtha dead, his seat up for grabs, Patrick Kennedy “retiring” in the face of very bad poll numbers, Scott Brown in “Ted Kennedy’s” seat. Passing a tax hike that will hit the middle class now is political suicide. Keep in mind the 800 pound gorilla waiting in the wings, the expiration of the “Bush Tax Cuts” next year. That’s going hit the middle class hard enough as is. Which Republican candidates for the House and Senate should use to their benefit.

Yes, the 2010 mid terms are going to be very interesting.