Friday, January 4, 2013

After the Fiscal Cliff: What do Democrats Want?

The Daily Beast  "For starters, there's a matter of timing.  President Obama just successfully raised taxes on the rich. Is he going to go back and do it again in a few months?  I'm not sure about the optics here: while I think that a tax increase on the rich was popular and inevitable, I don't think that Democrats will do well to position themselves as the party that does nothing but demand more tax increases, even on rich people.  Moreover, each successive tax increase is likely to be less popular than the last, precisely because the most politically popular increases inevitably get passed first.  A return to the Clinton-era tax levels on people who make more than $450,000 a year is, politically speaking, a no-brainer.  A further hike will peel off a few voters who just wanted the rich to pay their "fair share" and now feel content.  The third hike will be pushing rates close to 50%, if it is to raise any money at all.  That seems to be pushing pretty far past most Americans' ideas about what tax rates ought to be."
 Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

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