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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (55307)	9/6/2012 12:08:00 AM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Desperately Seeking Middle-Class Taxes What Obama's critique of Ryan tells us about Obama's budget plans. September 5, 2012, 7:03 p.m. ET. Democrats in Charlotte are pounding away at the savage budget cuts that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan supposedly favor and their phantom plan for "raising taxes on the middle class," as President Obama puts it. The truth is the opposite, but table that for a moment. The President seems not to realize his critique is really a scorching if implicit indictment of his own time in office. Think about his logic like this: Mr. Ryan's House budget details a long-range plan to equalize spending and tax revenues without—ahem—raising tax rates. But if such fiscal restraint is as deep and draconian as Mr. Obama claims, then as a matter of arithmetic the White House must favor a tax increase of an equal size, or something close to it, in order to pay for the amount of government he wants to sustain. * The nearby chart dramatizes this reality. It shows the accumulation of outstanding debt as a share of the economy in the modern era. This is debt held by the public—the kind the country has to pay back to bond investors, and not the IOUs that one part of the government owes to another part. These debt projections are highly speculative, and faster economic growth would do a great deal to mitigate them. But we offer them to help readers compare the Ryan and Obama budget visions. Mr. Ryan: "And then it takes off." Mr. Geithner: "Let's ask ourselves why they take off again. Why do they do that?" Mr. Ryan: "Because we have 10,000 people retiring every day and health-care costs going up." Mr. Geithner: "That's right. . . . We're not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to our long-term problem. What we do know is that we don't like yours." The only omission in Mr. Geithner's remarkable candor is that Democrats do have a plan, kind of. As debt continues to build, at some point U.S. creditors will lose confidence in the Treasury's ability to repay. Then Democrats and even some Republicans will impose a European-style value-added tax or another money machine to appease the bond markets. What voters should know is that this taxing big bang won't only hit the affluent. Far from it. For evidence, consult a recent study by Eric Toder, Jim Nunns and Joseph Rosenberg of the Tax Policy Center. We know this Brookings-Urban Institute shop has credibility with liberals, because it is the source of the fiction that the Romney-Ryan team wants to boost middle-class taxes. The researchers looked at how high income-tax rates would have to rise in the top two or even three tax brackets to lower debt to sustainable levels under something akin to CBO's alternative fiscal scenario. They conclude that even if the top rates hit 100%, the budget "cannot achieve the debt-reduction targets in some or any of the target years." Though conceding that near-total confiscation is "completely unrealistic," they report the results anyway "to indicate the infeasibility of achieving a high debt-reduction target simply by increasing top individual income tax rates." And this is from economists who favor higher taxes. * Another way of putting it is that the rich aren't nearly rich enough to finance Mr. Obama's spending ambitions. Sooner rather than later, Washington will come for the middle class, because that's where the real money is. Another thing Mr. Obama likes to say is that Messrs. Romney and Ryan "know their economic plan is not popular." Perhaps he can read minds, but at least they have a plan they're willing to put before voters. The President knows that voters won't like his, which is why he isn't honest about it. online.wsj.com