It’s about Taxes
I have to concur with Ezra Klein:
For Republicans, this isn’t about deficits. It’s about spending and taxes. If this were really about deficits, a win-win would be possible. Easy, even. Republicans want spending cuts, and those cut the deficit. Democrats want revenues, and those cut the deficit. See where I’m going with this? But where Democrats really are arguing over deficits — note their willingness to give more in spending cuts if Republicans will give more in revenues — Republicans want less deficit reduction because it’ll mean Democrats have less leverage with which to demand tax increases.
Indeed. If this was about deficits and the debt, then the $4 trillion proposal that the President put on the table would have been taken more seriously. The notion that we can move forward without any type of revenue increase whatsoever continues to strike me as fundamentally unserious. And, whatever else it is, it not a conservative position in the real sense of the term.
I’d go a step further — it’s not about taxes, it’s about taxes on rich people. I suspect that if Obama proposed a plan to force all the people who are now considered too poor to pay income taxes — you know, the parasites — to start paying twenty percent of their income in tax while simultaneously slashing income taxes on anyone making more than a million a year, the Republicans would jump to sign on.
As would, say, Charles Austin and Jay Tea.