Visual source: Newseum
With yesterday's vote against the Buffet rule, Republicans once again made clear to voters their loyalty to the wealthiest of Americans. Lisa Mascaro at The Los Angeles Times surveys the political landscape:
During a week when voters are acutely aware of how much they owe Uncle Sam, Congress is conducting a series of votes that crystallize the sharply different approaches the two parties take toward taxes and the economy. [...]
Pushing tax issues to the fore has been a successful strategy for Democrats. Their approval ratings have mostly climbed as Obama has rallied for increasing tax fairness and his party has portrayed the GOP as protecting the economic interests of the wealthiest Americans.
For Republicans, opposing the Buffett rule poses risks. Sixty percent of voters in a recent Gallup poll supported the proposal, which was named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has said he should not pay a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
With the upcoming debate about the disastrous Bush tax cuts,
Amie Parnes at
The Hill explains that tying Mitt Romney to George W. Bush's failed economic policies is going to be a key Obama campaign strategy:
President Obama and his surrogates are making repeated references to the economic policies of former President George W. Bush, seeking to tie Mitt Romney’s platform to that of the previous administration.
Team Obama argues the Romney campaign is advocating tax and economic policies that would repeat the problems that put the country into recession, exacerbate income inequality and prevent middle-class Americans from getting a “fair shot.” [...]
Linking Romney to Bush has both risks and rewards for Obama, who trailed Romney 47 percent to 45 in Gallup’s first national daily tracking poll, released Monday.
Many voters continue to blame Bush for the country’s rocky economy, something reflected in an AP-Gfk poll from December that found 43 percent of voters surveyed said the former president deserved much of the blame for the country’s economic woes. [...] Yet more than three years after Bush left office, observers also warn that Obama can’t blame the previous administration for his handling of the economy.
Richard Rubin at
Bloomberg looks at promises kept from the 2008 campaign:
President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on tax cuts for most Americans and tax increases for the fortunate few. He has delivered on the breaks and, for the most part, been unable to follow through on attempts to raise taxes. [...]
Obama hasn’t been able to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest earners or raise taxes for private equity managers. Each of his budget proposals called for allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, pushing the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. He also has proposed higher tax rates for the capital gains and dividends of top earners, along with caps on deductions and other tax breaks for that group.
During 2009 and 2010, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and at times had a reliable 60-vote bloc in the Senate that allowed them to advance legislation. They didn’t vote on extending the Bush tax cuts until after the 2010 election, and by then, they were unable to separate the breaks for high earners from those for other taxpayers.
David Kolb's piece at
The Muskegeon Chronicle is a must-read:
Ex-President George W. Bush last week tried to wish away the problematical taint of his name on those ruinous tax cuts passed by virtually every single Republican in Congress back in the early days of his awful reign. I’ll go Dubya one better, wishing the accurately named Bush tax cuts had never been enacted into law.
In fact, we should all wish we had never heard of the blasted things -- nor voted for any of the pre-tea party dunderheads who passed them, with all their negative weight, onto the stooped shoulders of an America that couldn’t afford them.
Just this single piece of Bush’s GOP agenda pushed through in the first term of his presidency -- his tax cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003 -- have added more dollars to the nation’s debt and deficit than almost all of the rest of his horrible policy initiatives combined.
Katrina Vanden Heuvel writing in
The Washington Post sounds the alarm about consensus fetishization and what it might mean during the Bush tax cut debate:
Obama, a mediator by instinct and experience, paid a deep price by trying to pursue bipartisan cooperation. He wasted months on health care as Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) engaged in phantom negotiations with supposed Republican moderates. The president turned prematurely to deficit reduction, and then to seeking a grand bargain with John Boehner, impervious to the reality that Boehner could not produce his caucus for any kind of tax hikes. Now, for the election, the president has begun to clarify the stark differences between the parties, to the benefit of his reelection and the public’s understanding.
But what makes the elite consensus so dangerous is that we’re headed into a train wreck after the election that will require some kind of a deal. By the end of the year, if nothing is done, the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits will expire, and the automatic sequester will cut another $110 billion out of discretionary spending for the remainder of the fiscal year. This would surely cripple the weak recovery we have, and very likely drive the economy into recession.
Annie Lowry at
The New York Times profiles two economists who are sounding the alarm about income equality in the United States:
Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have spent the last decade tracking the incomes of the poor, the middle class and the rich in countries across the world. More than anything else, their work shows that the top earners in the United States have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades, with inequality nearly as acute as it was before the Great Depression. [...]
Both admire, even adore, the United States, they say, for its entrepreneurial drive, innovative spirit and, not least, its academic excellence: the two met while re-searchers in Cambridge, Mass. But both also express bewilderment over the current conversation about whether the wealthy, who have taken most of America’s income gains over the last 30 years, should be paying higher taxes.
“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder. “People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.”