From the Wall Street Journal:
…In a speech Wednesday, Mr. Obama will propose cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and changes to Social Security, a discussion he has largely left to Democrats and Republicans in Congress. He also will call for tax increases for people making over $250,000 a year, a proposal contained in his 2012 budget, and changing parts of the tax code he thinks benefit the wealthy…
The story goes on to note that the President’s proposals have caught Congressional Democrats off guard…which indicates to me that this is a trial balloon. All of this, of course, is geared towards positioning Obama for his 2012 re-election effort. It is pretty much a certainty that no major reforms will take place right now – everyone is just going for position.
We Republicans have to be careful here – the fact that entitlement reforms are even being so much as mentioned is a good thing. The plain fact of the matter is that without entitlement reform, no budget plan will really solve our problem – at best, any other reforms will just put off the day of reckoning, and likely make it worse when it finally gets here. We need to tackle this – and if Obama is going to start talking about it, so much the better. But keep in mind that he won’t be serious about it…he’ll just want to talk about it, hoping that we GOPers will then trip ourselves up and he can present himself as both a deficit hawk and a savior of Social Security. In the matter of Social Security and other entitlements, our tactic should be to smoke out the President…don’t let him get away with platitudes about reform; force him to actually put something concrete on the table…something we can either incorporate in to real reform, or ridicule as damaging.
In this, our best tactic is to lay out generalities of our own but not commit ourselves to any specific action plan on entitlements until we at least have something solid from the President. As he is dishonest and only interested in getting re-elected, this will be difficult. He will put things off, make mealy-mouthed statements and, in general, do everything he can to vote “present” on the most important fiscal issue facing us. Naturally, he’ll want to put us in a bad light and, even more naturally, take credit for any worthwhile ideas and legislation which comes out of it. Caution, caution and more caution is necessary for us in the debate over entitlements.
On the other hand, we should get out in front of the President on taxes – and we can’t do that by just automatically condemning a tax increase proposal. We all know that a tax increase on incomes over $250,000 is not a tax on “the rich” – we know, that is, that such a tax is a tax on the most productive and economically worthwhile Americans. But as Obama will cast it as “the rich” and the MSM will endlessly say it is “the rich”, we have to live with the public perception that “the rich” are the only people being taxed…most people don’t make more than $250,000 a year and so in a lot of public minds, “the rich” will become “Bill Gates”, rather than the real target: the local plumbing contractor who grosses $800,000 a year and employs half a dozen people. We have to answer this, and “no new taxes” is not the best way to go.
Showing our willingness to compromise and our understanding that all must make sacrifices in order to get us out of this fiscal mess, we should make our rejoinder – we know that we need more revenues, and thus we are proposing a tax on wealth. Temporary; sunsetted after 3 years, but a tax none the less. It would be a 10% annual tax on wealth (cash, government bonds, commodities, property; but not stocks or private sector bonds) in excess of $5 million dollars. You have a fortune of, say, $1 billion? We’re taking $30 million of it. Sorry – but, please note, if it is in stocks, we won’t…if its just sitting around earning you money off taxpayer dollars (which is what government bonds do) or locked up in your mansion or just sitting in a cash account, then we’re grabbing it. Put it to work in the private economy, and it is safe. Now, why would I want this? I mean, other than having a law which pretty much forces investment in the private economy as opposed to parking it in government bonds or gold?
Because it allows us to play the class-warfare card against the Democrats as well as gets us off the hook for being perceived as pro-rich. You want to tax the rich? Fine – but we’re going to really tax the genuinely rich. Not the hard working small business owner, but the bazillionaire…and, most especially, the bazillionaire who is bankrolling a lot of leftist causes. The dirty, little secret of the super rich is that when they are not indifferent to politics, they mostly tilt to the left. Only a very few of the Forbes 400 can be classed in any way as conservative. Democrats have been playing class warfare on the cheap – protecting the super-rich who provide so much funding to liberal causes while hammering productive people with taxes…and all the while pretending they are fighting against the rich and their GOP protectors. This will turn the tables on them…imagine the phone call Obama will get from Soros when this is floated! Imagine Republicans being able to get out there on the stump arguing that, yes, the rich do need to pay their fair share…and here is our proposal to do it, and it is in marked contrast to Obama’s plan which would tax people of modest wealth while leaving the very rich alone.
By doing this we would put the Democrats out of their reckoning – they would be hard pressed to come up with a logical reason to oppose it (especially as this would come out after Obama announced his plan to increase income taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year), but their super-rich money-bags will be demanding that this be stopped in its tracks. We’ll be throwing a hand grenade in to their ranks while at the same time cultivating a populist and reasonable profile for ourselves. Keep in mind that liberal rank-and-file types really think that when Obama says “tax the rich” he means the genuinely rich; making such a proposal would sow confusion in liberal ranks as they try to digest the fact that we will tax the super-rich while Obama won’t…and, may, indeed, fight hard against it. And, remember, most of this is about positioning for 2012 – it is, once again, highly unlikely that anything resembling a permanent fix will come out of the upcoming budget debates.
Democrats are working their plan – unite the liberal base, divide the GOP base; Obama figures that a proposed tax hike combined with some rhetoric about entitlement reform will peel off some RINOs and create a rift in the GOP. By answering him back with a tax on wealth while holding fire on entitlement reforms, we’ll be splitting them…and as we would wrap our plans up with a pretty bow of budget cuts to useless spending (and there are bags of that in the government, as we all know), we’ll be uniting our base at the same time.
Anyway, that is my idea – whatever does come out of the leadership, it had better be something smashing and unique. We can’t play by Obama’s rules – we have to make a new set of rules and force him to play on our field. That is the only way we beat him, and beat liberalism in general. Winning in 2012 calls for boldness – for getting out of the political rut; thinking anew and acting anew. Obama is the weakest President in our history; liberalism is a dead ideology – we have to bury it. I’ve presented my shovel to dig the grave of Obamunism – if you’ve got a better, then let’s hear it.
Blogs For Victory 