Obama Caves In On Tax Increases
So this is the way it will be. No fight. No argument. Just weasel words to cover for the fact that our dear leader cannot summon the spine to confront his opponents. To the Republicans this must feel like shooting fish in a barrel. A very small barrel.
One of the big issues left undone by the insipid and ineffective Democratic majority, now mercifully swept away, was what to do with the Bush tax increases due to come into effect January 1st. And before you get all testy with me for calling them tax increases and not tax cuts: what else could you call them? They are increases in tax that result from legislation passed by a Republican president and a Republican Congress 10 years ago. Dignifying them by referring to the “expiry” of tax cuts is misleading. Had the GOP intended not impose this 2011 tax increase they could have voted that way back in 2001. But, no, they decided to pass a tax increase into law. So tax increase it is. A great English tax attorney – in the equivalent of the Supreme Court – once opined sagely that an income tax is a tax on income. Duh. This is the same thing. A tax increase is an increase in tax. That is what is due on January 1st 2011 courtesy of Bush and the Republicans.
Given this correct terminology, I fail to see how the Democrats and Obama could not have made political hay by opposing them. People don’t like tax increases so opposing them should have been a sure vote winner. Yet here we are, the Democrats are trashed in an election, and Obama surrenders before a shot is fired. All the GOP had to do was mumble about allowing the middle class tax increase to come into effect if Obama stood his ground and tried to allow the tax on the rich to go through. This was a political fight worth having. It would have alerted voters to the tax and spend fiscal policy that the GOP has followed for decades – since Reagan plunged us into a permanent peacetime deficit – and cast Obama as the defender of the middle class and yet fiscally responsible at the same time.
This would have required a little brinkmanship and mettle. Thus Obama caved in. He has no mettle and finds brinkmanship too demeaning.
Thus he abdicates at the first opportunity and tries to convince us that he caved in as a sensible way to protect the middle class from the rampaging tax increases Bush set in motion. Except of course that’s not what the media and the middle class will hear. They will understand that the Republicans saved the tax cuts from Democrats intent on increasing government spending.
We live in an Alice in Wonderland world where the GOP can say anything and get away with it because there is no push back or fight from the alternative. Facts, such as the enormous increase in government spending put in place by both Reagan and the Bush’s get lost. The narrative is that the Democrats spend. The fact that the largest peacetime deficits are the result of Republican policies is also lost. As is the fact that our long term deficit issue – the one that vexes the Tea Party so much – is entirely a Republican product.
It is irksome in the extreme that this message never gets through.
Even more irksome is the complete lack of fight from the White House.
If this is the way things will be over the next two years, then I have no idea what Obama thinks his platform will look like when he runs for re-election.
What does he call himself?
“First Wimp”? It would fit.
