Republicans and the Middle

[wayward son !]

Republicans and the Middle
Class
For months, Republican leaders have been uniform in their insistence
that they would allow everyone’s taxes to rise if the rich did not get
to keep their Bush-
era tax breaks. Mr. Obama has proposed continuing the tax cut for the
98 percent of taxpaying families earning less than $250,000 while
allowing the tax rates for the top 2 percent to return to their
levels
prior to the Bush administration. Republicans have demanded tax cuts
for all, and, so far, not a single Republican leader has lined up
behind Mr. Boehner’s concession.

Even his deputy, Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, issued a no-
compromise statement on Monday demanding a “clean bill,” which means
one that would make no distinction between tax cuts for the rich and
for everyone else. Anything short of that, he said, is a
“nonstarter.”
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, introduced a
bill on Monday that would extend the tax cuts indefinitely for
everyone, including the wealthiest Americans. He may well be joined
by
Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, and a few
conservative Democrats.


But we hope Mr. Boehner would not be the only Republican to refuse to
allow middle-class tax rates to rise, as they are scheduled to do at
the end of this year. Even if it gave Democrats something to crow
about, cutting those rates makes economic sense during a recession
(though we disagree with Mr. Obama’s plan to cut the rates
permanently). 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.


Ultimately, the case for the top-level tax cuts is increasingly
shaky.
If Republicans are the least bit serious about reducing the deficit,
they have to acknowledge that doing so requires additional revenues,
$700 billion of which would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners
in
the next decade if their taxes do not rise. Handing out those
revenues
to the rich would have little stimulative effect on the economy
because those taxpayers tend to save rather than spend their marginal
income.


Mr. Cantor and other hard-line tax-cutters like to claim that the
high-
end cuts would go to small businesses and other “job creators.” But
they should listen carefully to another of Mr. Boehner’s surprising
acknowledgments on Sunday. Under sharp questioning from Bob Schieffer
on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Boehner admitted that only 3
percent of small businesses would pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s
proposal. As the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation recently
reported, 97 percent of the taxpayers with business income would get
a
cut under Mr. Obama’s plan.


That is something that Republicans simply do not say out loud; it
would add inconvenient facts to a battle that they prefer to wage at
a
purely emotional level. But Mr. Obama’s efforts to enact a reasonable
tax policy are not just good politics. They make good sense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/opinion/14tue1.html?_r=1