Posted on 01/12/2015 7:55:33 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If you thought the Democrats – recently chased into the minority – were going to sit by quietly while the GOP put all the proposals on the table, think again. Their agenda to fix America (at least in terms understood by your dog and your veterinarian) will still be on the table. The rallying cry of income inequality isn’t going anywhere, and Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) is ready to lay out the next plan in what the Washington Post laughably calls a “stark shift in messaging” for 2015.
Okay, boys… let’s see what you’ve got.
Senior Democrats, dissatisfied with the party’s tepid prescriptions for combating income inequality, are drafting an “action plan” that calls for a massive transfer of wealth from the super-rich and Wall Street traders to the heart of the middle class.
The centerpiece of the proposal, set to be unveiled Monday by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), is a “paycheck bonus credit” that would shave $2,000 a year off the tax bills of couples earning less than $200,000. Other provisions would nearly triple the tax credit for child care and reward people who save at least $500 a year.
The windfall — about $1.2 trillion over a decade — would come directly from the pockets of Wall Street “high rollers” through a new fee on financial transactions, and from the top 1 percent of earners, who would lose billions of dollars in lucrative tax breaks.
So you’re cooking up a populist plan to use the tax code to target the most wealthy and successful Americans and hand out the money to everyone else. Perhaps I missed part of the story, but exactly how does this work out as a stark shift in Democrat messaging?
“The challenge is a big one. You have to think big, you have to think forward, and you have to think new. You have to think new and fresh,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in an interview, endorsing Van Hollen’s proposal. Van Hollen said that he has briefed senior administration officials and that they were receptive.
For some reason the Washington Post is apparently going to allow both Pelosi and Van Hollen to describe this as fresh new thinking with a straight face, while failing to even note that this is the same playbook the Democrats have been working out of for most of our lifetimes. But they do at least acknowledge the one serious fly in the ointment; the GOP now controls which bills make it out of committee for a vote, and this plan is never even going to make its way out of the closet.
That won’t bother Pelosi and company, though, since they obviously never expect it to come to a vote. What they’re doing is trying to lay the groundwork for 2016 and the platform that Hillary Clinton will run on. Their ideas on foreign policy, civil unrest, gun control and a raft of other issues haven’t been selling very well lately, so they will fall back on the one thing they know best. You can always dig up a significant pool of votes from people who resent the wealthy and won’t be too opposed to dragging them down a bit, even if it makes little or no difference of significance in their own lives. It’s worked for Pelosi’s party before, so why would they abandon it now?
In the meantime, some of the Republicans’ 2016 hopefuls have obviously taken notice of how the Democrats will approach the race, and are starting to grab that banner themselves. The trick here is to approach it in terms of addressing wage stagnation and the lower upward mobility available to the middle class. But rather than going with the liberal strategy of equality of outcome, the GOP has the chance to make the case for equality of opportunity by talking about how a more robust economy and greater availability of jobs will exert upward pressure on wages and increase middle class spending, boosting the entire economy. In order to work, though, it has to be demonstrated in a way which reaches workers in the one place they can all relate to… their take-home pay.
But as that WaPo piece shows, there is no need to guess what their opponents will be talking about. New year. Same Democrats. Everything old is new again.
Envy.
Understand that if your household income is greater than $100,000, they’re targeting you. My wife and I both work, have no kids, no debt, and we are certain they are targeting us because we’re “rich.”
Democrats need to understand Robin Hood was a work of fiction.
Heckuva job, Barky!
“Perhaps I missed part of the story, but exactly how does this work out as a stark shift in Democrat messaging?”
Good point. It’s exactly the same package with a different colored ribbon. Raise taxes. Keep a bunch of the increased taxes for the government. Pay what is left to some favored interest groups.
It would work a lot better if they just ended the cronyism that created the problem in the first place.
And a pass for their rich liberal donors.
Perhaps someone should ‘splain to the the meaning of the word: ‘minority’.....................
All your money are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Ha ha ha ha…
For Great (social) Justice!
If the Dems are looking to tax the “wealthy”, I suggest they start with their donor list, starting at the top of it, those people on that list seem to have so much money to fritter away that they can blow it on checks to the DNC.
We have a spending problem and not a taxation problem.
Taxation is theft. More of it is more theft.
And even at that, IIRC. He did not rob the rich to give to the poor. He targeted the tax collector to return the unjustly confiscated money to the people.
Maybe they should start with hat in hand by visiting their proliffic donors, but we all know they won;t.
You have the story wrong. Robin Hood stole from the government that had taxed the people into poverty, not the rich.
This has Liz Warren’s fingerprints all over it.
While many FReepers scoff, I believe she will be a formidable candidate in 2016.
“new fee on financial transactions”
I wonder if this includes a fee for us peons putting money in our local banks. You have to use circular logic when dealing with this bunch.
The thing that really bothers me about these ‘tax the rich’ b.s. schemes is that in actuality they are targeting the upper middle class, not the rich. The true ‘rich’, like Gates, Soros, Bloomberg, etc. don't even have to have an ‘income’ in the way that the average person does. They are generally impervious to what comes out of Congress and the Administration.
On the other hand, if an industrious hard-working carpenter and a dentist, or a successful IT person, etc. get married, they can easily make over $200,000/year family income - depending on what part of the country they live in and how many hours they put in. Are they ‘rich’? Are they the ‘problem’?
If you're going to add taxes to target the rich, there are much better ways to do this (not that I'm in favor of it). If you want to cut the influence of the truly rich, heavily tax their political activities. Arguably anyone who has enough money, like Soros, to fund multiple political agendas, should have to pay a dollar to the US treasury for every dollar spent on political causes. The democrats would never support this, as it would put a big dent in their $20,000/plate ‘dinners’, and their Hollywood gravy train.
They want to tax people who've worked very hard for years to get to the point at which they start to make good money, but they maintain tax exempt status for private universities like Harvard, which has an endowment of ~$36 billion. You want to start redistributing wealth, have the universities with big endowments pay an ‘educational’ tax equal to 2-5% of their endowment/year to the treasury. I'm not advocating for this, but it makes more sense from a ‘fairness’ perspective than targeting couples who make more than $200,000/year (an arbitrary figure that can easily be adjusted downward, at the whim of the politicians).
I believe she will be the nominee because even the Democrats understand how unlikable Hillary is, that's why they want with Obama in 2008.
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