Obama is proposing raising taxes on the rich. I would say “Hallelujah! Obama has come back to his progressive roots,” except I don’t believe a word of it. Proposing a tax plan to a Congress which you KNOW will not enact it is not a sign of sincerity, nosiree.
I see it as a cheap way for the Democrats to shore up their progressive base, which as surveys have indicated, is well to the left of the Republican-Lites, as Washington Democrats are now known among progressives. After all, Obama does not have to worry about getting re-elected. So by throwing this out as a sop to the Democratic base, he gets all the benefits of a move to the left and none of the liabilities (i.e., loss of goodwill of the donor class who would the target of the tax hikes).
His one mistake … believing he has an ounce of credibility among progressives on economic issues. He does not.
He’s using the SotU speech as a political tool, which is what all presidents do. And which is why it would be good for Congress (and I say any Congress to any President) to disinvite the prez to give the speech in the first place. Just write a damn letter and let it go at that. You’ll still get to grandstand, if only in writing, and you won’t commandeer all the networks and cable news channels at once.
I’ll be quite honest here. I’m a liberal who thinks everybody should pay taxes.
I support financial credits for low income people, but they should be government grants. Nobody should get a tax refund unless it is actually a tax refund. Everybody in this nation, on April 15th, should be fully aware that money is going from them to the government.
That said, we can’t support the nation solely on taxing the rich. The voters of this country need to wake up and pay attention. We need to pay for infrastructure, we need to pay for the military, we need to pay for our government! We can’t vote ourselves bread and circuses without also voting to pay for it.
There are a lot of government functions that are certainly open to debate. I’m awfully tired, though, of those who say that we need to starve the beast. Government is not a beast, it is us.
Obama is going use the bully pulpit that is the SoTU to force republicans into rejecting a tax cut for the middle class. While that is an amusing prospect, I’d rather see any tax cuts, by law, tied to spending cuts instead of tax hikes. Starving the beast and de-funding are equally stupid ways to go about governing.
The President isn’t “feinting”. This is who he is. He’s actually more liberal, I have no doubt he’d raise taxes on the middle class if it wasn’t the third rail. And the only way to get any support at all for raising taxes on even the rich is to give most of the money back to the middle class. While leaving a little profit for his other priorities, single payer-internet and community college.
We know it’s not going to pass, but it’s putting down your marker as a starting point of negotiation. It’s about time that Obama’s first offer was in terms of what Democrats would want as opposed to a genuine middle point. Obama’s history has been to start with what he thinks would be the halfway point, and Republicans use that to get 80% of what they want. His approval ratings are up, the economy is starting to move, let’s use the momentum and shoot for what Democrats want.
It would be helpful if you could define what you would define as “confront(ing) terrorism”, or at least what you would like to hear about it. Otherwise I would say no one is likely to have any idea what you are talking about.
Some being two, and so far the only primary source for this is Fox News. Think I’ll wait for something from a slightly more reputable organization.
Original or not, it’s on point and accurate. The GOP is trying to build credibility for the party by showing that they can govern and act like mature adults. Canceling the SotU address as its known in modern times would look like kids playing politics.
It Obama’s real interests were liberal he would have tried this and quite a few other things back when his party had control of both houses of Congress, or at least one house. Doing it now is just an exercise in bad faith.
As i understand it, Obama’s idea is to be revenue-neutral: lowering taxes on the middle class will be balanced by increased taxes on the wealthy. And it’s generally a good thing (the money freed up by doing so will be spent by the middle class and the poor in local economies, not hidden in offshore tax havens). I don’t see it as a “starve the beast” thing at all.
I can’t answer the first question, but I can answer the first one: because progressives did not vote for the centrist Democrats in the last election. There are a lot of narratives that the crushing Republican victory in the last election was the usual midterm voter apathy. But the extent of it argues otherwise. The Republicans won almost every disputed seat. Meanwhile, every progressive voter initiative won. This just might tell an objective observer something. So the centrist Dems and Obama figure it might be worthwhile to make a few empty gestures to appease the progressive base now that the Republican majority in Congress ensures that those gestures will be meaningless, in terms of actual legislation.