Republican caucus did not back Democrats' tax cuts

The statement

"We passed without, frankly, the help of the Republican caucus, we passed 25 tax cuts last year, mostly aimed at the middle class and small businesses ." David Axelrod, on Sunday in NBC's Meet the Press

The ruling

With the recent Massachusetts Senate election redefining the political landscape in Washington, NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory asked David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, whether the president needs to start moving more toward the middle.

Axelrod responded that Republicans and Democrats ought to be working together on ways to stimulate job growth, but he said Republicans have not gotten on board even when it comes to tax cuts that Republicans have traditionally supported.

"We passed without, frankly, the help of the Republican caucus, we passed 25 tax cuts last year, mostly aimed at the middle class and small businesses," Axelrod said.

We were intrigued by the claim that Democrats passed 25 tax cuts last year, so we contacted the White House press office and asked for a list. And it gave us one, all from the economic stimulus package championed by Obama and signed on Feb. 17, 2009.

We checked them out and came up with a grand total of 25, too. In all, tax cuts amounted to about a third of the cost of the $862 billion stimulus over the next decade.

Which leads us to the question of whether all of these 25 qualify as tax cuts?

"In a way this reminds me of Clinton's 'It depends on what your meaning of is is' comments," said Rosanne Altshuler, director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "It depends on what you mean by tax cuts."

"These are all provisions that cut your taxes," she said, "but most of them are temporary," designed to stimulate a floundering economy.

Each of the tax provisions in the stimulus could have been broken into separate bills, said Bob Williams, also of the Tax Policy Center, and on their own could have rightly been billed as separate tax cuts.

"I think it's fair to say that various tax provisions in the stimulus could be considered tax cuts. I don't think that's being deceptive," he said.

We agree.

But there's one other element of Axelrod's claim, that cuts were passed without the help of Republicans. The stimulus passed the House with nary a Republican vote. It passed the Senate with just three (though one of them, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, is now a Democrat).

So it's certainly fair to say the stimulus passed without the help of the Republican caucus. We find Axelrod's statement True.

PolitiFact staff writer Robert Farley. This ruling has been edited for print. For the full ruling — and others — see PolitiFact.com.