If a Democrat cuts taxes and nobody notices, did it really happen?
by digby
Eleanor Clift gives kudos to the White House for its important achievements:
Obama has invested so much time demonizing the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that he has obscured the true narrative of his presidency. Class-war rhetoric aside, Obama is one of the most prolific tax cutters in recent history, with a record that puts him squarely alongside that of George W. Bush.
Crunching the numbers at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, analyst Michael Linden found that if one compares the cost of tax cuts in just the first four years of Bush’s term (2001–04) to the first four years of Obama’s (2009–12), Obama’s tax cuts are bigger. The value of the Bush tax cuts were about $475 billion in those first four years, or about 1.1 percent of GDP. Obama’s total about $1 trillion, or 1.6 percent of GDP.
Obama has cut taxes to lower levels than Bush did, says Linden. This is because, of course, Obama thus far has extended all of the Bush tax cuts and then cut taxes on top of that. His original stimulus bill in 2009 had $290 billion in Making Work Pay tax cuts. His speech Thursday night before Congress advocated for another $175 billion in payroll tax cuts, which come on top of $110 billion from last December’s budget deal. Speeded-up expensing for business adds another $10 billion or so.
All in all, Obama is responsible for many billions in tax cuts, yet the popular perception is that he has raised taxes.
Imagine that. I wonder how it happened? Clift says that these tax cuts are temporary and all in service of fixing the economy, which makes them better than Republican tax cuts —- which also explains why Republicans hate them. I guess.
But the good news in all this is that the White House seems to have finally realized that they have gotten zero political benefit from all this tax and spending cutting and are now proposing to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to pay for their jobs plan. It’s hard to know if they will have the guts to sustain this argument after what is sure to be a full scale hissy fit from the Big Money Boyz, but it certainly is better than running around touting deficit cutting as the most important issue in world history.
This is essentially a campaign position, since Republicans would rather turn in their guns and gay marry Al Sharpton than raise taxes in an election year (or ever.) The question we all have to ask at this point is how to turn that campaign position into action to hold the White House to it if they manage to get re-elected.
They also seem to be downplaying the earlier insistence on Medicare and medicaid cuts, so perhaps they’ve had second thoughts about doing that. (Why they put it in the jobs speech is anyone’s guess.) Maybe the new polling numbers have shown them that Medicare is not something to be bandied about as part of any “deals” with lunatics. And it’s always possible that they sent out that trial balloon to see just how loud the horrible hippies would scream. It was pretty loud. Maybe it worked.
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