President Obama made it clear he wasn’t going to be satisfied with the tax increase on upper income earners that he forced on Congress during the showdown over the fiscal cliff. Though in fact all wage earners suffered a loss this week as the payroll taxes surged, the president and his liberal supporters are determined to inflict even more pain on more people in any upcoming budget talks. However, one of the leading advocates for the president’s redistributionist position, the New York Times editorial page, is worried that in settling for a deal that raised taxes on those earning more than $400,000 a year, he has made it harder for the left to foist another job-killing tax increase on the country. So, to make this bitter pill easier for Americans to swallow, the Times claims that plans to confiscate more private income for government use is actually “reform.”
Leaving aside the fact that trying to squeeze more revenue for the government out of taxpayers won’t do much, if anything, to avert the budget crisis, the use of the word reform in this context is straight out of Orwell. Reform implies making the system fairer, which for some on the left is synonymous with soaking the rich. But a genuine reform of the system is one that will incentivize achievement, not penalizing it as well as making the labyrinthine code simpler and more understandable. But when liberals use this word it is merely code for policy driven by left-wing ideology and not pragmatism or the country’s economic health.
In the view of the Times, anything that creates a more progressive system in which more money is siphoned out of the private sector and into the hands of Washington is a form of reform no matter how convoluted the system might be. That’s a distraction from the country’s real problems that have everything to do with spending and little to do with not enough taxes. But it is also pure liberal cant rather than sensible economics.
But the Times is right on target in one respect. Having bulldozed Congress into the fiscal deal tax hike, the president and his followers are in no position to push for even more tax hikes. The payroll tax windfall for Uncle Sam also makes this argument difficult to sell to a skeptical public, let alone a Republican House of Representatives that is determined that it won’t be scammed in this manner again.
We can expect to hear more of this distorted argument in the coming weeks and months, but the main takeaway from this discussion ought to inform the way the upcoming debt ceiling fight is covered. Redistribution isn’t tax reform. It’s actually a way to avoid reform as well as irrelevant to the cause of preventing the country from sinking into bankruptcy. The Times editorial as well as the rhetoric coming out of the Democrats in recent days makes it apparent that instead of this confrontation being one between extremist Republicans and a sensible White House, the real ideologues in this argument are among the ranks of the president’s supporters.
I thought that when taxes were increased so greatly on the "rich" last week," we were to work on the spending side, moving on to entitlement reform. It seems that won't happent if Pelosi et al. have their way. Could this "reform" business be any more dishonest that it has been?
This is a clown article, bro. n nDemocrats are such extremists on taxes that they just made permanent 98.4% of the Bush tax rates, and raised the top rate on 1.6% of people to those horrible Clinton rates, which, by historical standards, aren't extreme at all. n nAnd when it comes to the payroll tax cut, it was always meant to be temporary and the Republicans opposed it in the first place. If it was not for the President and Democrats Americans would have been paying the current, higher payroll tax rate for the past two years.
Laugh out loud. Today's economy is not the economy under Clinton. This new taxes won't help the deficit or the economy, instead, it may sink the economy.__Payroll taxes is to fund the Social Security. Obama was killing the Social Security to bankrupt it faster.
"sigh"… Bro, how about you just stick with your "reality" and we will deal with how the world actually works. Folks like you make it abundantly clear that, no matter how an administration's policies actually play out, you are going to support the progressive position. At least most of the columnists and posters here have the ability to acknowledge when they are incorrect or mistaken while the lib-progs… eh, not so much…
Was that a reply to my statement? n nYou think Democrats are extreme for locking in over 98% of the Bush tax cuts they originally opposed? n nAre you aware of why payroll taxes went up this past January and how the GOP opposed this temporary tax cut in the first place? n nYou claim I am incorrect, yet you don't specify how or why. You make generalizations about what I support, while ignoring the fact that I made two specific statements regarding tax policies pursued by the administration and never stated whether I support either of them. n nYou got a better response? I'll wait for it. n n
Extreme isn't defined by the Clinton rates. Extreme is defined by the fact the tax code was already progressive in the extreme with the top payers paying MOST of the taxes and now there is only talk from democrats about taxing this group more. The "mercy" on lower taxpayers is just electoral politics and they raise taxes on the rest of us through things that the average moron Democrat voters doesn't notice like fees,etc (See California). The payroll tax is part of the general fund and not a lockbox which the Democrats pretend it is. Republican opposition to the supposed "contributions" to a supposed pension fund come out of the supposed pension fund. I don't blame you for being confused as these entitlements have switched labels back and forth between taxes and contributions since FDR .
The argument between progressive versus conservative tax and economic policy is no longer theoretical, it is empirical. The evidence is in. Greece, Spain, Italy and of course California. No matter the good intentions of the Left sooner or later you run out of other peoples money. Liberal economic policies are summer up in one word "unsustainable."