Plenty of Demonrats will announce their support for extending most of the Bush tax cuts but NOT the rate cut from about 39.5% to 35% on the top marginal incomes above the $250,000 line. Then the Demonrats will draw the line against the latter and will say that they were willing to give the Republicans virtually all of the tax cuts with that one exception and the Republicans stopped the tax cuts because of that one exception. There will be wealthy people who will be po’d because the estate tax will be restored through the ritual GOP stupidity. We are already hearing tales about wealthy codgers in poor health planning pre-12/31/10 suicides to avoid restored estate taxes.
Why not treat everyone equally and either raise or keep low everyones’ taxes?
I am a lifelong Yankee fan. Casey Stengel was the manager when I was a kid. In 1960, he made some really grave errors in the World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. They played the seventh and final game well but were losing by three runs very late in the game. The Yankees were having their customary pitching problems and loaded the bases with Pirates in the eighth or ninth inning. Two pitchers were in the bullpen: Ralph Terry and Whitey Ford (the greatest money pitcher I ever hope to see who had three days rest with the whole winter to recuperate). Ford had shut the Pirates out twice in the series but Casey slavishly followed the notion of wanting a right-handed pitcher (Ralph Terry) to face a right-handed batter (Bill Mazeroski). Terry became known as Ralph "Home Run" Terry and was soon enough a golf pro. Bill Mazeroski hit the home run (a rarity in his career) and somehow wound up in the Hall of Fame. Casey was fired and was hired to manage the appalling Mets the next year. In 1961, surveying his team made up of used to almostbes, wannabes but never weres and nobodies, Casey, in frustration, asked: Doesn't anyone here know how to play this game???
Politics can be like baseball. The Republicans when not led by Ronaldus Maximus more resemble Casey's Mets than Casey's Yankees (aka The Dynasty). The Demonrats live and breathe politics, are past masters at exploiting every resentment of almost ever voter. While the Republicans raise the alienation of voters to an art form, the Democrats collect most of the alienated voters often in entire ethnic groups or occupational groups. The Demonrats and those voters really don't care what is equal or fair regardless of their lying rhetoric. When we cling to tax cuts for the big guys even when it jeopardizes some of the tax cuts for the big guys (i.e., eliminating the estate tax) as well as everyone else's tax cuts, the Demonrats eat us for lunch smirking all the way.
There are two great traditions in American politics.
One is the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The Democrats are the oldest party and objectively the greatest party when viewed from the point of view of party success. That party was captured by outright communists under George McGovern in the anti-Vietnam War insanity. The reds have run that party ever since and Obamao is merely an example of what they now want to offer. Nonetheless, Andrew Jackson was a stupendously great man and great POTUS.
The other great tradition is the Republican tradition. It appears to be far newer but is not. The idea of a political party genuflecting to business interests and wealthy folks began under George Washington and the Federalists. Study the Mount Vernon Conference, the Annapolis Conference and the resulting Constitutional Convention which massacred the law and the amendment provisions of the Articles of Confederation. The two conferences were supposed to be about navigation of the Potomac but were actually Federalist scheming to empower a new federal regime usable by Federalists to enhance their business interests. The Federalists lasted two terms of George Washington and one of John Adams and were gone altogether soon enough thereafter because of popular revulsion against their Hamiltonian heresies against the interests of ordinary Americans. BUT, there had to be a money party so the Whigs were invented to work at federal funding of "internal improvements" benefiting Whig businessmen. The Whigs fell apart over slavery but also were seldom elected nationally. They disappeared in the 1850s. The Republican Party added the abolitionist crowd who were not notably poor folks but insufferably elitist New England Unitarians and Congregationalists whose ancestors rode the Mayflower and had owned the Northeast because they stole it fair and square from the Indians. The Republicans have been divided at least since the day Lincoln was shot. Reconstruction was not just about principle but also about economically raping the Southland. Fortunately, the early Republicans also tended to be moral spokesmen and that has been an important base of party support ever since. Today, we defend the babies, marriage, morality, guns, the contract that is the Constitution, and the right of folks to live their lives unmolested, unbought and unbossed by nanny nag liberals.
There is often a class bias to the nanny nags. They just know that being affluent and having elite educations and what not proves that they know better than the rest of us how we should live our lives. The GOP response to the lifestyle nannynags should be MYOB.
The late Senator Henry Jackson, staunch anti-communist but himself a socialist, observed as his Democrat Party was being seized by McGovern and the reds: "I take second place to no man in calling myself a liberal but I do not have to be a damn fool." His style, if not his ideology, was that of Andrew Jackson. If the Demonrats have abandoned Andrew Jackson, maybe we should acquire him and make him a GOP icon.
Finally, bear in mind that in the conscious lifetimes of early Baby Boomers, the tax rates on high marginal income were probably at 80% or more. Reagan brought those scandalous rates down to the range of about 39%. However despotic the original rates were, no one said that we must cut everyone's taxes by 40% or so to give everyone else the benefit enjoyed by the big guys or not have tax cuts at all. Most of us recognized a far greater need for taxes on those very wealthy folks to be drastically reduced as a matter of justice. Only the Demonratic Party hacks complained. The big guys drew major benefit from Reagan's tax policies as they should have but Reagan is no longer with us and Obamao is no Reagan and we should take whatever tax cuts we can get. If the wealthy don't get everything they want with Obamao in the White House, that is no reason to reject other cuts.
What you are arguing for today, I would have argued for a couple of decades ago. With all due respect, I no longer agree with what I believed then. You and I may respectfully disagree on this and I suspect we do but I have been pinging you in spite of that not to change your mind but to keep you in the conversation.