Senate Democrats are revisiting proposals to raise taxes on high-income people to help pay for an overhaul of the health-care system.
The main proposal getting renewed attention is one by President Barack Obama that would limit the federal tax deductions for higher-income families for mortgage interest and other widely claimed purposes, said two senior Senate Democratic aides.
Now, all I can say is that the Democrats need to be more self aware. The most potent attack on them, historically, on domestic issues, is the label of tax and spend. What are they proposing here? They want to spend at least one trillion dollars over the next ten years. They want to pay for it by increasing taxes.
I suppose this is the problem with having leadership as far left as the Dem leadership is now. They must not realize just how perfectly this proposal fits the tax and spend stereotype. Frankly, it shows that the Democrats are out of ideas. They have nothing of substance to offer and so they bust out an idea that has been put out there and soundly rejected by the public.
Are the Democrats really so tone deaf that they don't realize how corrosive the image that they are the party of tax and spend is to them? This the subject of a plethora of potential advertisements all over the country. So, why would they recycle this idea? If this had any political legs, it would have passed by now. This sort of class warfare politics works when you are attacking someone else's policies. In other words, attacking the Republicans for policies that benefit the rich is effective. Yet, when your policies tax the rich to spend on the poor, you are just tax and spend. It appears the Democrats haven't figured this out yet.
7 comments:
I have to laugh at the Dems (and those who bought into the Dems propaganda) during the Presidential campaign who bloviated about how they had all the "new" ideas. And the Republicans were old ideas. There was NOTHING new about their "new" ideas. Just their old ideas of tax and spend and borrow and regulate cloaked with the word "new". Sure, my ideas are hundreds of years old too. But my ideas are called freedom.
And yet, the Democrats have a huge majority in Congress. Apparently that "tax and spend" has more support among voters than you thought. Hell, just a few weeks ago you were talking about how this is about as popular of a tax increase there is.
If you read the piece, I explained that this sort of politics works when you're out of power. It doesn't work when you're in power.
If you think that the Dems sudden rise has anything to do with them and not with the utter failure of the Reps then you are clueless.
Oh I know the Democrats didn't win, the Republicans lost. But do YOU know the reason why?
The Democrats, for all intents and purposes, are not a political party at all. They are an amalgamation of disparate persons and interest groups whose only common bond is that they've been branded by the Republicans as undesirables.
Fivethirtyeight.com, in the aftermath of the 2008 election, claimed that the Republicans cannot survive as the party of angry white people forever, that sooner or later they will have to make less of an effort to actively discourage minorities from voting for them (would Bush have won in 2004 if he didn't have Hispanic support?) In addition, the Republicans would have to come to terms with the fact that Americans LIKE government spending.
Frankly, I don't see either one of these happening. What I do see, however, is a day where there are so few angry whites left in this country that the Republicans will be consigned to permanent 30% status. At which point, the Democrats will split in two, leaving a liberal party and a center-right party that supports fiscal conservatism and a strong national defense without the overt appeals to white nationalism like the Republicans.
On what planet do you get the idea that Americans like government spending? That's hilarious. The reason that Obama's agenda is stalled is because Americans hate government spending. America is rejecting his agenda precisely because they hate government spending. If Americans loved government spending, we'd have his health care package by now. Where do you get your political knowledge from?
I live on a planet where the federal government is the nation's largest employer. I live on a planet where American's biggest fear of health care reform is that it will eat into Medicare, a government run health insurance company.
I live on a planet where the WTO is on the verge of collapse because we won't stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars on farm subsidies because nobody wants to offend the Iowa Caucus people.
I live on a planet where we built almost 47 thousand miles of interstate freeways.
Apparently you live on a planet where government is a euphemism for the police and the military. One to invade foreign countries for strategic resources, the other to protect you from the inevitable Red October your Reaganite beliefs would lead us all to.
If you want forced Capitalism at gunpoint, I'm afraid Nazi Germany has been destroyed, so I can't tell you to "go back" there like Republicans tell Democrats to go to Canada. But I'm sure you can make do with any of the third world dictatorships that still litter the landscape. Let me know how that turns out for you.
No one can accuse me of subverting other thoughts, because yours are out there. In any case, first you didn't answer the question. I didn't ask for a defense of government spending. Rather I asked for proof that the American people want that. That, you didn't provide.
I don't know how or why you think the government being the biggest employer is a good thing. The American people do not want universal health care. That's why they are rejecting the President's plan. Nazi Germany was not capitalism forced at gun point. I'm not even sure what that means.
There's a big difference between building roads and universal health care. I don't know what the WTO reference is for and frankly a lot of what you said is inexplicable.
Again though, what evidence do you have that the American people want it.
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