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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (2403)	6/19/2003 6:18:24 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793957

siggggghh! What possible reason would Kerry have had in 1997 to say that Iraq had WMD if they in fact, did not?

To: JohnM who wrote (2403)	6/19/2003 8:42:34 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793957

NEW REPUBLIC - WHAT IS GROVER NORQUIST TALKING ABOUT?: One thing we didn't really understand the first time Grover Norquist laid it out on The Washington Post op-ed page, and which we still don't understand now that David Broder has reprised it in his own column , is why lowering the taxes of rich people so that they face the same tax rates as poor people makes it harder to raise taxes on rich people in the future. As Norquist put it: Conservatives want to move to a flat-rate income tax for both economic and political reasons....The political goal is to unite all taxpayers. When taxpayers are divided into different tax brackets, they can be mugged one at a time through the "divide, isolate and tax" strategy that Clinton pursued when he promised to tax "just the top 2 percent" of earners. Huh? What's so magical about "uniting all taxpayers" at the same rate? If someone like Bill Clinton could come along at a time when the average rich person faced a vastly higher tax rate than the average poor person and get a lot of political mileage out of promising to raise that rate even higher, why would it get harder to raise taxes on the rich once the average rich person was paying the same low rate as the average poor person? Intuitively, it seems like it would get a lot easier at that point, no? Particularly since the level of government services you can afford if you tax rich people, middle-class people, and poor people all at the same low rate is much, much stingier than the level of services you can afford if you tax middle-class and poor people at the same low rate but gouge rich people. Suppose, for example, that Norquist et al have to abolish Medicare and Social Security to make it possible for rich people to pay so little in taxes. Wouldn't the average voter think that a candidate who proposed restoring these programs by jacking up taxes on the richest 2 or 5 or 10 percent of taxpayers was offering them a great deal? Pace Broder, if I'm a Democratic strategist, Norquist's scenario doesn't scary at all. It sounds positively inviting! UPDATE: Alert reader M.K. points out that "...Social Security taxes, which more or less are flat taxes and where taxing the rich more is in fact quite hard to do, is probably a bad example." True enough. Let's replace that Social Security example with Head Start, cancer research, and low-interest college loans. tnr.com