Monday, June 16, 2008

Paul Krugman saves me the trouble

In my notebook I have an entry that reads simply "tax relief for the middle class." I jotted that down after hearing Obama say that during a speech. I was going to write something about how the adoption of Bush's language for describing tax cuts represented Obama "thinking like an elephant" by putting a Democratic spin on a Republican frame (think about that one for a second.) I was also going to try and buttress that point by saying something about how the Tax Policy Center's analysis showed that Obama's plan will lose 7% of expected revenue under current law over the next 10 years but will raise revenue by 2% if you take Bush's tax cuts as a baseline demonstrates the way that the Republican Party is rewarded by acting ever more ideologically by dragging the American center "right."

I would have had some difficulty articulating that point to my satisfaction*. Thankfully, however, I won't have to try since Paul Krugman has written an op-ed which sort of says that same thing.

*My frustration at not being able to articulate to my satisfaction my response to Sean Hannity is the reason I was experiencing difficulty with that post despite having the content of the post done for days now. I stepped away from it for a day or so to clear my head and will just suck it up and post it tomorrow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just this morning, I heard Joe Scarborough say that the the democrats "take from the rich and give to the poor." But would he ever (EVER!) say of his side that they take from the poor and give to the rich? This infuriates me - all spin, no sense.

Hume's Ghost said...

That's not even really all that true. Democrats have been assisting Republicans in shifting the tax burden onto the middle class for 30 years now. They've also been complicit in taking from the poor to give to the rich.

Of course, Democrats who do support redistributing income from the rich to the non-rich argue its an investment in society. And they've been proved right ... the rise of the propserous middle class after WWII showed that. On the other hand, the era of Reagan has given us an income disparity unseen since before Depression.

Hume's Ghost said...

Yikes. I just noticed two typos in this post ... I wrote "20 years" intead of "10" and wrote the will raise revenues 2% twice.