William Voegeli: Americans Don’t Hate the Rich
[William Voegeli, a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, is the author of Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Encounter 2010) and a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Salvatori Center.]
The liberal-opinion industry spoke with one voice: President Obama’s tax plan was his party’s best hope to avert a midterm disaster. Over Labor Day weekend, Obama called on Congress to continue the Bush tax cuts for every family making less than $250,000 per year and to let income tax rates revert to their pre-2001 levels only on income above that threshold.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait wrote that raising taxes on the rich is “wildly popular.” Indeed, voters “are in favor of pretty much any measure that takes money from the rich.” The columnist E.J. Dionne agreed. Refusing to continue the Bush tax rates for high-income families would rally the Democratic base in advance of the 2010 midterm elections: “What do Democrats stand for if they are not willing to take on this cause?” The New York Times editorialized that the Obama plan, by cornering the GOP, was smart politics on behalf of good policy: “Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.”
And then a funny thing happened. Nothing. First the Democratic House and then the Democratic Senate decided to adjourn without holding a vote on Obama’s tax proposal. They wanted to go home to campaign, but a decisive contingent of vulnerable incumbents refused to campaign on that. Democrats postponed consideration of the issue to the relative safety of a post-election lame-duck session.
The commentariat was furious. The Democrats have taken the “Curl Up in a Fetal Position Plan on taxes” wrote Chait, a choice he found “crazy,” “pure political suicide,” and “one of the nuttiest decisions, on pure political grounds, I’ve ever seen.” Expressing himself more temperately than Chait, as most people do, Dionne wrote, “For the life of me, I don’t get why some Democrats are so afraid of this vote.” “Profiles in Timidity” was the Times’s editorial verdict when the Democrats decided not to decide.
There are two problems with this indictment...
Read entire article at Commentary
The liberal-opinion industry spoke with one voice: President Obama’s tax plan was his party’s best hope to avert a midterm disaster. Over Labor Day weekend, Obama called on Congress to continue the Bush tax cuts for every family making less than $250,000 per year and to let income tax rates revert to their pre-2001 levels only on income above that threshold.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait wrote that raising taxes on the rich is “wildly popular.” Indeed, voters “are in favor of pretty much any measure that takes money from the rich.” The columnist E.J. Dionne agreed. Refusing to continue the Bush tax rates for high-income families would rally the Democratic base in advance of the 2010 midterm elections: “What do Democrats stand for if they are not willing to take on this cause?” The New York Times editorialized that the Obama plan, by cornering the GOP, was smart politics on behalf of good policy: “Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.”
And then a funny thing happened. Nothing. First the Democratic House and then the Democratic Senate decided to adjourn without holding a vote on Obama’s tax proposal. They wanted to go home to campaign, but a decisive contingent of vulnerable incumbents refused to campaign on that. Democrats postponed consideration of the issue to the relative safety of a post-election lame-duck session.
The commentariat was furious. The Democrats have taken the “Curl Up in a Fetal Position Plan on taxes” wrote Chait, a choice he found “crazy,” “pure political suicide,” and “one of the nuttiest decisions, on pure political grounds, I’ve ever seen.” Expressing himself more temperately than Chait, as most people do, Dionne wrote, “For the life of me, I don’t get why some Democrats are so afraid of this vote.” “Profiles in Timidity” was the Times’s editorial verdict when the Democrats decided not to decide.
There are two problems with this indictment...