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?