We’re clearly smack dab in the middle of silly season, a silly season that began extra early this year. Silly season is the traditional period in the presidential election year when everyone stops governing and everything becomes ridiculously political. We already had a taste of it with the debate over who hates dogs more, and now we’re back to a perennial favorite – tax cuts for the rich.
As my colleague Jim Hoeft noted on BD and in the Daily Press earlier this week, the President is out on the stump now, campaigning for extending the Bush tax cuts to all taxpayers who earn less than $250,000 in income. This kind of pandering is inevitable in an election year, and it’s what we’ve come to expect from the Democratic party – when all else fails, let’s gin up some good ole’ fashioned class warfare.
Republicans want the tax cuts extended permanently for everyone. Democrats only seem to want to soak the rich, and any small businesses that file as individuals be damned.
If you actually look at what Democrats say about taxes and raising revenue, the President’s push makes this whole debate look silly and transparently political. And that’s saying a lot for an issue that is the textbook definition of political pandering – promising a tax cut for the middle class in an election year.
But this is different, they claim. The President reminded everyone in a speech yesterday that all he’s asking is for the rich to pay the same tax rates they paid in the Clinton era, and then goes on to list the litany of good things economically happening back then, from budget surpluses to low unemployment. He has bought into the story spun by liberal economists like Alan Blinder and Paul Krugman that tax cuts don’t spur economic growth. So keeping taxes low, they say, won’t help the economy.
It’s just about fairness, right? All those rich people have so much money they don’t need, they should just give it to the government so the rest of us don’t have to pay as much. It’s only fair they pay more, because they have more. Remember, as Joe Biden said, paying taxes is “patriotic.”
If the Democrats really believed everything they say, they should have no problems raising taxes on every single American who pays income taxes. They shouldn’t be talking about taxes at all – they should be arguing that all the Bush era tax cuts should expire and stay expired. If it’s patriotic for the wealthy to pay taxes, it’s just as patriotic for the rest of us. Are we all not in this union together?
All we hear from Democrats in Congress is that we can’t cut our way out of the current budget deficit. That even if we cut every program, we still wouldn’t be able to balance the budget. This is their argument for increasing taxes. If that’s the case, why should the top 10% of tax payers – who already pay 75% of the income taxes out there – be responsible alone for balancing the budget?
The answer is simple: there’s a big difference between what they believe, what they say, and what is politically smart or even feasible. If Democrats truly believe that the only way to balance the budget is to raise taxes, and that raising taxes doesn’t harm the economy, then they should have no problems accepting a tax increase on the middle and lower classes as well. If the Clinton tax rates were good enough for the rich, why aren’t they good enough for the middle class too?
It’s time for the Democrats to start being honest. If we truly need to raise revenue to cover the budget deficit, then they should be advocating for increasing taxes on every American who pays them, not just on one select group that are easy to demagogue.
We all know Obama is desperately afraid of a Walter Mondale moment. Mondale effectively lost the White House when he admitted he was going to raise taxes in the debates with Ronald Reagan. Obama knows that all he has to do is nothing to see the tax increases he wants go through. But instead, he’s taking the politically expedient, easy way out and campaigning for tax cuts for those making less than $250k a year, knowing it will probably never pass and letting him continue his theme of Rich Romney Republicans against the middle-class that is the traditional Democratic fall back argument when they can’t run on any kind of a record.
If the President and the Democrats had any guts on this issue, they’d just come right out and say what they really feel – the government needs more tax revenue so taxes need to go up.
They won’t do that, so we get another week of nonsense.
Silly season is truly upon us.
