The New York Times informs us that taxing the rich isn’t the solution to all our problems:
WASHINGTON — Behind Democrats’ struggle to pay the $1 trillion 10-year cost of President Obama’s promise to overhaul the health care system is their collision with another of his well-known pledges: that 95 percent of Americans “will not see their taxes increase by a single dime” during his term.
This will not be the last time that the president runs into a conflict between his audacious agenda and his pay-as-you-go guarantee, when only 5 percent of taxpayers are being asked to chip in. Critics from conservative to liberal warn that Mr. Obama has tied his and Congress’s hands on a range of issues, including tax reform and the need to reduce deficits topping $1 trillion a year.
“You can only go to the same well so many times,” said Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the Reagan administration.
In the budget, Mr. Obama and Congress have already agreed to let the Bush tax cuts for the most affluent expire after 2010, as scheduled, but to extend them for everyone else. The top rates, now 33 percent and 35 percent, will revert to Clinton-era levels of 36 percent and 39.6 percent.
But with Obama moving full-steam-ahead on health care reform and a whole host of other ambitious spending programs, the money’s going to have to come from somewhere. We’ve already added close to another trillion dollars to the National Debt, so simply printing money isn’t going to be as easy as it was in the past.
No, if the Obama Administration is going to fund all the goodies it’s promising there’s really only one option:
“There is no way we can pay for health care and the rest of the Obama agenda, plus get our long-term deficits under control, simply by raising taxes on the wealthy,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, a former Clinton administration budget official. “The middle class is going to have to contribute as well.”
The day is coming when Obama will get on television and tell us all that, as much as he doesn’t want to, he has to propose higher taxes on the middle class. It will happen. Then, let’s see how happy all the soccer moms with “Obama/Biden” bimber stickers on their Honda Odyssey’s are.
The only “problem” taxing the rich is a solution to is … having people who are “rich.”
Of course, that IS the problem for those of the ideological ilk of those who read and believe the New York Times.
[...] Below the Beltway discovers a rare bit of sanity in the New York Times here. [...]