Out on a Limb

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Yeah, well, shut up, you Republican losers. Obama won, which means a majority of Americans support his policies. Stop being obstructionist and get with the program.

Oh wait, sorry. That quote wasn’t from a Republican but from a recently elected Democrat. It was referring not to Obama but to George W. Bush after the 2004 election. The author: Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois. The book: “The Audacity of Hope.”

In the following paragraph, Sen. Obama goes on to complain about antitax activist Grover Norquist, who was “unconstrained by the decorum of public office.” On Tuesday, as PBS’s “NewsHour” reports, President Obama met with a group of similarly unconstrained “leaders of labor and liberal groups” at the White House to discuss economic policy.

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the teachers union that styles itself the National Education Association, told the network: “I brought the message that, number one, it’s important that we let the Bush tax cuts disappear for the wealthiest 2%. As we’re looking for a $1.2 trillion solution, $829 billion takes us a long way there.”

Do you see the problem here? The annual budget deficit has been running at around $1.2 trillion. (The Hill reports the deficit for October alone was $120 billion.) Raising taxes on “the wealthiest 2%,” it is estimated, would increase government revenues $829 billion over a decade. When Van Roekel says the tax hike “takes us a long way there,” he’s off by an order of magnitude.

The president’s answer is still more massive, job-killing tax increases:

Obama is taking a hard line with congressional Republicans heading into negotiations over the year-end “fiscal cliff,” making no opening concessions and calling for far more in new taxes than Republicans have so far been willing to consider.

Obama plans to open talks using his most recent budget proposal, which sought to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy by $1.6 trillion over the next decade.

That would be accomplished by hitting taxpayers twice–raising rates and limiting deductions. Republicans had expressed a willingness to consider limits on deductions in exchange for lower rates.

The occasion for urgency of the debate is the “fiscal cliff,” which refers not to the medium- to long-term unsustainability of the current rates of spending and borrowing but to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the year. Unless Congress acts, which would require bipartisan agreement, everyone’s taxes will automatically rise.

In theory that means both parties have an incentive to compromise. But The Wall Street Journal wonders in an editorial if the president “really doesn’t care if there’s a budget deal this year that avoids the tax cliff”:

By taking an absolutist line, he’s basically gambling that Republicans will be more reasonable than he is and will blink. But if they don’t blink and we go over the cliff, from his point of view so what? Mr. Obama then has an excuse to blame Republicans if there’s another recession. Meanwhile, he pockets the higher tax rates that take effect on January 1 anyway, and he can then negotiate a budget deal next year without having to make any tax concessions.

The Obama tax hikes would both be too much and too little–too much not to dampen already weak economic growth, too little to stop the rapid accumulation of debt.

Meanwhile, National Journal reports that “Senate Democratic leaders . . . rejected putting any entitlement reforms forward ahead of Friday’s meeting” with congressional leaders at the White House. “In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talked only about what he won’t accept during negotiations–namely, any changes to Social Security.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis reports that Obama’s budget also calls for some $577 billion in spending cuts. “That’s $3 of tax hikes for every $1 of spending cuts. Even if you include interest savings, 60% of the debt reduction comes from tax hikes.” And what happens when interest rates go up? That’s the real fiscal cliff, one toward which Obama and Democrats apparently intend, as his campaign slogan had it, to keep moving “Forward.”

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”