Oooh, the Republicans have handed Democrats a victory on a silver platter! Oooh, if Democrats call the Republicans' bluff and just let all the tax rates go up starting in January 1st the Republicans will be done with for sure!!
Really? You really think that letting all the tax cuts expire is a winning strategy? Really?
Please show me the evidence. If the evidence is public opinion polls showing the majority of Americans support extending the tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income but not on anything over that, well then you haven't provided any good evidence that Democrats would be better off by simply letting the tax cuts expire because the Republicans filibustered.
Honestly, I'm getting extremely tired of the group think that it absolutely killing this site. This site is losing what made it great. What made it great was not passion but intellect. Lots of sites have passion -- Red State has passion, for crying out loud. This site has now allowed passion ("primary Obama!"), buzz words ("catfood commission"), and tunnel vision ("anything other than total victory is spineless concession!") to dominate the conversation. It's not only annoying, but it is too often devoid of any hard thinking.
What do I see when I think hard on this tax issue? I imagine two little kids sitting in the back seat of their mother's car. The mother promises to take them ice cream if they both behave. One of the kids behaves absolutely perfectly. The other kid throws a temper tantrum. The mom looks back and tells them that they are headed straight home -- no ice cream parlor. The well-behaved kid pleads with her mom to at least let her get ice cream. The mom says no, because the deal was that they'd get ice cream if they both behaved. Who do you think the well-behaved kid is more pissed off at -- her sibling, or her mother?
When a middle class family struggling to survive in this economy goes to the polls in 2012, do you really think they be saying, "Well, those damn Republicans forced the Democrats to let my taxes go up. Fuck those Republicans"? If you think that, I'm sorry but you are absolutely unhooked from reality. Please come out of the echo chamber. I'd bet my life that the average voter would be more pissed off at the Democrats. Why do I think this? Because when it comes down to it, the average middle class family doesn't give a shit if some guy living in Manhattan got a tax cut too, even if it caused the deficit to go up by $70 billion a year.
Here's what I see happening right now with the tax cut issue. Obama is taking the "long" view -- meaning two years. As long as he can get the "rich people" tax cut decoupled from the "middle class tax cut," that's a pretty substantial victory. Extending the Bush tax cuts on the upper income earners for two years will not damage our economy, or balloon our deficit, more than letting all the tax cuts expire would (if we let all the tax cuts expire, I think most economists would guarantee you that revenues would plummet). So let them be extended. Honestly, as long as they expire in 2012, with the middle class tax cuts still intact, who fucking cares. The middle class will get there tax cut permanently, the upper wage earnings will have two more years to ride the Bush tax cut wave, and Obama will be congratulated in the media as someone who can compromise with Republicans and get Republicans to compromise with him.
Is this really that bad a result? The politically stupid result? Not the best result we could have hoped to achieve?
If the decoupling of the tax cuts isn't the minimum outcome here, I'll be pissed off and will agree with all of you that the Democrats deserve to get their asses handed to them in 2012. But I don't expect that to be the result. If the Republicans filibuster a bill that merely temporarily extends the upper income Bush tax cuts, this will lay bare that they are not seeking those cuts merely because of the current state of the economy (an argument that is both economically and superficially plausible for a temporary extension of the upper income cuts). If the Democrats were forced to let the tax cuts expire at that point, I think that the Democrats could probably make the average voter in 2012 more pissed off at the Republicans.