Picking Up Obama's Gauntlet on Taxes

Wall Street Journal ^ | February 14, 2012 | HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

...........Mr.Obama's insincerity on tax reform has been a giant missed opportunity. Mr. Romney is the get-it-done candidate. He could not only point to Mr. Obama's failure to act, but explain why—because it would conflict with the campaign of class resentment that he and his surrogates are so busy denying they intend to run on in the fall.

Mr.Romney needs to do something. Mr.Santorum's rise is a telling rebuke—a "conservative" who hails from a blue state and yet who succeeded because he found a natural way to bridge the gap, thanks to his affiliation with unions and hard-hat workers. Yes, his resulting tax and subsidy prescriptions may be unwise, but at least he's made his way without repeatedly flipping positions on fundamental issues.

Mr.Romney has been as mealy-mouthed, in his own way, as Mr.Obama on taxes, favoring a pro-growth tax code for everybody but "the rich." Mr.Obama and Mr.Romney could both do themselves a favor, talking honestly for a change about what they believe, if they turned the campaign into a debate about whether we want a tax code geared toward redistribution or toward growth.

For that matter, all Republicans in the race, including Mr.Santorum, could learn from Ronald Reagan, whose name they constantly invoke. In a parting address to his White House staff on Dec. 13, 1988, Reagan touched all the conservative hot buttons but placed instructively narrow brackets on his own administration's contributions, saying: "As a first step, we said that the way to restore vitality to the economy was to cut marginal tax rates and cut needless regulations."

This is wisdom. Americans know the right way to live and don't need either party's social engineering (to borrow a phrase from Newt Gingrich). What they need is more prosperity, to enable them to live the lives they aspire to.

[Flintlock]

Lemmie paraphrase this incoherent mess:

We gotta have the ESTABLISHMENT RINORomney!

The only thruth here is that Willard and Barry are BOTH abunch of Fakers.