Tax Hikes?

The National Review, like many conservatives, likes the tax cuts the Republican Congress passed when Bush was president. But I think their arguments in defense of the cuts are disingenuous. It is true that if the cuts are not extended now it would amount to a de facto tax hike, but is it really a "middle class" tax hike?

In this article, entitled, "No Missouri Compromise" (a reference to legislation in which the conflict over slavery was forestalled by artificial means -- though for 45 years, to be fair), the writer says that

a fair number of two-earner households consisting of the likes of policemen, nurses, public-school administrators, and other professionals whose combined household incomes frequently top $250,000 but who can hardly be demonized as “the rich”

would be affected.

Really? How many couples of cops make $250,000?

And then he says

now Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, has trotted out Plan C: confining rate hikes to “millionaires,” meaning any household with an income exceeding $1 million. Senator McCaskill has never been the sharpest financial mind in the Senate, but even she should be able to figure out that a married couple earning $1 million in 2010 does not necessarily consist of “millionaires” — depending on their state and local tax burdens, they’re likely to be barely halfway there even before they have spent one thin dime of their own earnings

OK, that's right. But are we really saying that we want to be sure to protect the 5% of the people who make $500,000 even once at the expense of the rest of us, who need the help? And what about the deficit that The National Review hates so much? What services have toi be cut so that the couple earning a million dollars a year -- even before taxes -- does not suffer so much?

Just to Win, Or to Govern?

The Republican Party won important seats in the November elections. It’s clear that voters are impatient with the slow pace of economic growth, and they are not sure what the United States is supposed to be doing in Iraq and Afghanistan any longer. Nancy Pelosi, for reasons that escape me, attracted Republican ire more than anyone else, and so the House of Representatives is now controlled by a Republican majority.

The question is whether those new representatives came to govern or only to conquer. Some of the noise coming from the victors is not promising. It’s utter nonsense to say that they plan to repeal “Obamacare,” the health care reform law (or set of laws) passed just last year. Not only can they muster nothing like a veto-busting majority in either house of Congress, but just about no one thinks it would be a good idea to repeal the law now that it’s been put into motion. Calling for immediate tax cuts in the middle of an economic crisis (though we may not be in the middle any more) is also not a smart idea. Republicans also dissed the president by saying they could not find the time to meet with him when he asked for a sit-down. That’s just petty.

But the new Speaker of the House, John Boenher, has said some more hopeful things. He is no Blue Dog, but at least he has acknowledged that the new Republicans need to find common ground with the president and the Democratic-controlled Senate. Even with the Tea Party types howling at the moon, it may happen that the Republicans can help clean up some of the flaws in the financial and health care reforms and then push us forward.

It’s also up to the Democrats, and the president in particular, to stop feeling sorry for themselves and fight back. They need not only to seek consensus but to push some weight around – weight they certainly have, if only in the White House.