The Coming Democratic Tax Increase

American Spectator ^ | 04/06/2007 | EagleUSA

[EagleUSA]

The Democrats just can't resist. Whenever they get control of the nation's pocketbook, they end up exposing their political Achilles' heel by trying to raise taxes. Just months into their new majorities on Capitol Hill, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are already playing to type.

Last week, House Democrats passed a budget blueprint that would wipe out existing tax cuts while mostly ignoring the rising costs of the alternative minimum tax. With an anticipated take of $400 billion over five years, the result would be a bigger tax increase than Bill Clinton's in 1993 -- the one that helped cost Democrats control of Congress the following year.

And Clinton was a bit savvier about his tax-hiking. After scrapping his promised middle-class tax cut, the Man from Hope vowed that he would only raise taxes on the richest 1 percent of income earners who weren't "paying their fair share." While that wasn't exactly true -- the boost in the gasoline tax and other levies hit taxpayers across the board -- the rise in marginal income tax rates was mostly skewed toward the upper-income taxpayers (and more than a few job-creating small businesses).

Clinton even sweetened the medicine with an expanded earned income tax credit, so he could claim, however tendentiously, to be cutting taxes for the poor as well as raising them for the rich.

But the House Democrats' plan is straight out of Walter Mondale's across-the-board tax increase handbook. The bottom income tax rate would jump from 10 percent to 15 percent. More than five million families and individuals with no income tax liability would be added back to the tax rolls.

[Strutt9]

The rats think they have a mandate, because the MSM told them that they do.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Um..... because we elected him to keep taxes down. He has the power to veto a tax increase. If he signs one.... then he’s as much to blame as those who wrote and passed it.

I'm not arguing with that. I just see an upside to letting the Democrats publicly screw things up. There will be consequences.