Harold Pollack on Barack Obama
Harold:
President Obama: I love you, but you need to raise your game: Judging by recent press reports, the White House is apparently folding on the Bush tax cuts for people with incomes exceeding $250,000. On several levels, this is one of the most depressing episodes of the entire Obama presidency.... [C]aving in on this issue amounts to bad social and fiscal policy. (See Jonathan Chait’s several hundred columns making the rubble bounce on this theme.) The Bush tax cuts on the $250,000+ group squander $700 billion over the next decade. Especially in these hard times, when it’s a heavy political lift to finance basic services, that is vastly irresponsible.... People who earn more than $250,000 per year can afford to pay a few percentage points more, as they did during the Clinton era....
[T]he Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that permanent extension of Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers has an almost eerily similar impact on federal deficits as does the entire unfunded liability of our Social Security system. Somehow, all that scary talk about deficits and Social Security’s genuine but manageable long-term shortfall doesn’t carry over to this numerically equivalent issue in tax policy.
Perhaps most depressing, this episode illustrates the periodic preemptive surrenders that are frustrating to the President’s closest supporters....
To give up on this issue backtracks on a clear campaign plank... concedes to Republicans a mandate they have not earned.... The “American people” do not support tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor, for that matter, do majorities support the deficit commission’s fundamentally conservative vision of limited government....
President Obama.... I am one of your proud and strong supporters. I will continue to be. Yet it’s time for you to raise your game...
