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Obama must raise taxes on middle class
Lawrence Haas
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: If you happened to watch the Sunday talk shows this past weekend, you saw a classic example of a favorite Washington political tactic. The trial balloon. Key members of the White House economic team seemed to suggest the president would be open to raising taxes to control the deficit. That would be politically challenging for the president. Because back during the campaign, candidate Obama said, and frequently, too, that he wouldn't raise taxes on people making up to $250,000 a year. The White House spent most of Monday trying to pop that trial balloon. Commentator Lawrence Haas says they ought to just own up to it.
LAWRENCE HAAS: Let me end the suspense. After the economy recovers, President Obama will raise taxes on middle-class Americans. He has to. He simply can't fulfill his no-tax pledge and govern effectively.
Here's why:
We are bleeding red ink like never before. We're running the largest budget deficits in our history, and our lenders, like China, may not keep buying our debt. They're already nervous that we'll just print more money to pay our bills. That will cause inflation to rise and their investments to shrink in value.
At some point, our investors may go elsewhere. We would then have to raise our interest rates to entice other countries to lend to us. That would threaten our economic recovery, and that's something the president wants to avoid.
We can't cut our deficit enough without raising taxes. What's mainly driving our deficit is the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And Americans won't support big enough cuts in those programs alone to reduce the deficit.
And we can't raise taxes just on the rich to stem the red ink. There aren't enough rich people.
Besides, forget the deficit for a minute. We can't even do the things we need to do, like provide health care for all Americans, without raising taxes on the middle class.
That's why Congress is stalled on health reform. They don't want to raise taxes on middle-class Americans, but they may have to.
Obama is learning a hard lesson: don't make tax promises that you can't keep. It helps you get elected, but it makes it much harder to govern.
Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and the first Bush all faced rising deficits, and all raised taxes after promising not to. Obama will be no different. He'll raise taxes because, frankly, it's the right thing to do.
RYSSDAL: Lawrence Haas was communication director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton.
What they mean to say is had Reagan not dramatically reduced taxes for the rich leaving the country bleeding red ink and the wage gap the widest of all industrialized countries we'd be fine. And what we should do is put the tax rate on the rich back to where it was. That and since republicans raised taxes on the middle class we should lower those tax rates by to where they were.
Does the middle class have any income left to tax? How about raising taxes on members of Congress? Or taxing their campaign contributions? What happened to the taxpayer being made whole on all of these bailouts? The bailed out firms have reported record profits. Where is that money?
In his commentary on the possibility of a future middle class tax hike, Larry Haas states: "He'll(Obama)raise taxes because, frankly, it's the right thing to do." I contest Mr. Haas' choice of words. It is not the "right" thing to do, it's the easiest. The right thing to do is to drastically cut the size of the federal government and to eliminate our many costly misguided policies. Obama's earlier announcement of the closure of the Dept of Education's Paris office is just the tip of the iceberg of government waste and corruption. I worked in the federal government and know first-hand the sickening waste and low productivity in general. As for policies, agricultural subsidies to agribusiness, paying Israel and Egypt to not fight, the mass freeloading on our social welfare programs, building schools and other civil infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan are just to name a few. But you will no more get Congress or the President to eliminate these than you will get them to reduce their guaranteed pension after serving just one term. Face it, just increase taxes, it's much easier.
How do you say nuanced response?
The tax which ostensibly pays for the social programs, or at least most of them is the FICA. FICA taxes only the first $102,000.00 of any and every taxpayer's income. Regressive to say the least. So yes,all taxpayers with an income over $102,000.00 need to have their taxes raised. Do you think that higher income payers will ask to have the straight-up FICA tax schedule revised? Is payday Friday? Does......downhill?
