Republican Talking Points, Tax Edition

Hillary Clinton drops a little anti-tax demagoguery on the voters of Nevada. I wish Barack Obama hadn't started talking about the need to fix Social Security, but it's no bettter for Clinton to go around slamming a lifting of the FICA cap as some kind of death blow to the middle class. I assume at some point in her administration she'll want to increase the tax burden on high-income individuals for some purpose or other.

UPDATE: What Jon Cohn said (he, for the record, is much more of an Obama-critic than I am).

Comments

I assume at some point in her administration she'll want to increase the tax burden on high-income individuals for some purpose or other.

Are you serious? She'll want to put a hurting on her donors? She's DLC remember. Remember the talk about closing the loophole for hedge fund managers? Do you really think she'd vote for closing it when Schumer was whining about closing it?

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | January 17, 2008 10:03 AM

I'm sure all the liberals who rushed to denounce Obama's candidacy back when he started talking about lifting the payroll tax cap will do the same to Clinton now that she's demagoguing on taxes. Just like they did when her campaign started pitching itself into a stream of racist smears and doing constant, Giuliani-style scaremongering about an imminent terrorist attack.

Posted by Christmas | January 17, 2008 10:07 AM

We might exempt middle class folks for maybe $97,000 for up to $200,000; t

Excellent! My self-employed plumber won't have to pay $2000 more after all!

Posted by Gary Sugar | January 17, 2008 10:09 AM

You know, one could mean by "fix Social Security" something like "stop spending all of the SS funds on other shit." Then you wouldn't have to say "put it in a lockbox" and get the obligatory derision.

Posted by Sam Hutcheson | January 17, 2008 10:13 AM

Isn't Clinton's own position that we need a new bipartisan commission to study Social Security? Lame answer, especially since when she was gathering all that Experience from 1993-2001 her husband actually had people studying solutions, but I guess Clinton's non-answer is a good response to getting Russerted on this umpteen times.

Posted by David Weigel | January 17, 2008 10:36 AM

In response to Christmas, I absolutely hope that Clinton gets slammed for this BS. It sucked when she used the "trillion dollar tax increase" line in the debate, and it sucks now.

Posted by Clark | January 17, 2008 11:49 AM

"We might exempt middle class folks for maybe $97,000 for up to $200,000"

Ooh, since we're playing this game, let's waive all taxes for all families making between $75k and $200k. We can really sock it to the poor and the rich to make up for it!

(Seriously, this sort of pander plays directly into the GOP's hands. Either lift the cap or don't. Don't lift the cap in a manner that is targeted to help some -- but not all -- groups. Unless those groups are the very poor. Which someone making between $97k and $200k is not.)

Posted by Joe | January 17, 2008 11:57 AM

I think the big difference here is that Obama's Social Security rhetoric adopts a right-wing frame, but doesn't propose a right-wing solution (while he says there's a crisis, his proposed solution is to fund the system better, not destroy it), while Clinton is just explicitly adopting a right-wing policy (taxes can never be raised on people who are doing pretty well for themselves).

Posted by LittleMac | January 17, 2008 12:55 PM

It's nice to see that Evita has embraced the GOP's you-can-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to governance. Can an endorsement from the Club for Growth be far behind?

Posted by Traven | January 17, 2008 12:59 PM

Although that effort failed, the fight is recent enough -- and myth of a Social Security crisis prevalent enough -- that merely echoing the language is enough to jeopardize the program (which, for the record, is most definitely not in crisis).

Wow, "merely echoing the language is enough to jeopardize the program." He can't possibly mean that. Talk about hyping a crisis! The privatization plan was DOA because there is broad and deep support for Social Security in this country. It ain't going anywhere absent a some kind of a massive budget crisis in the future. So the best way to protect Social Security (and the entire social safety net) is to make sure government's finances are in reasonably decent shape. Why are some liberals so scared of Republicans on an inssue where they have the enduring support of the electorate behind them?

Posted by Led | January 17, 2008 1:22 PM

Clinton's examples of "middle class" are also a pander. A Las Vegas, NV Police captain, a Nassau County, NY police officer -- these departments are in the top 1% of police pay in the nation and there is a lot of public policy criticism of the police departments that generate massive amounts of overtime on an ongoing basis.

So Clinton is A) misrepresenting what middle class means (it' not the top 6% of earners) and B) hurting communities that want to negotiate reasonbable police contracts.

Nevada has the 4 highest paying police departments in all of the West and yet Nevada still has some of the worst crime in the nation. Wouldn't hiring more police at a lower wage give you better policing?

Where's Paul Tsongas and his Pander Bear when you need him?

Posted by joejoejoe | January 17, 2008 2:01 PM

Either lift the cap or don't. Don't lift the cap in a manner that is targeted to help some -- but not all -- groups. Unless those groups are the very poor. Which someone making between $97k and $200k is not.

Eh? The point is that right now all income below $97K (actually I think it's $102K) is taxable and all income above is exempt. Obama's proposal is to raise taxes on individuals earning over $200k and not on anyone else. I think it's pretty much a truism that since Bush's tax cuts have gone overwhelmingly to those making over $200k, that the bulk of tax increases should hit those people. It doesn't seem to me that raising taxes on people making over $200k is showing special favoritism to people making between $97k and $200k. The poor would be no worse off under this proposal.

Posted by Matt Weiner | January 17, 2008 4:14 PM

And, last time I got into an argument about this (when Obama was talking about raising the cap instead of a donut hole), the response I got was basically "Raise taxes on those making over $200k, because in some locations $97k isn't enough to live rich."

Posted by Matt Weiner | January 17, 2008 4:19 PM

Count on Hillary to grab a right-wing meme that same day that Obama raises the ghost of St. Ronnie! Our candidates get worse by the day! Just raise the damn cap across the board and be done with it (unless the added revenue allows us to increase payments to the elderly and disabled).

I am getting slammed as a purity troll on the Obama/Reagan thread and being held up as the reason why Democrats might lose the next election even with all the preset advantages. I have a feeling if Obama or Hillary loses the election it will be because they didn't offer enough of a difference from the Republican or because our media overlords think the Republican would be a better guy to sit down with over a beer, not because they weren't lefty enough.

Posted by Ricky | January 17, 2008 4:48 PM

This is a HUGE DEAL b/c Hillary is sending these mailers to TONS and TONS of voters, and it's nearly impossible to rebut them before the caucuses.

It's the same thing she pulled in NH that went almost entirely unnoticed by the media (b/c if there's no video of it, in their eyes it didn't happen).

Now tons of low-info Democrats are going to have a "typical tax-and-spend liberal" view of Obama, which may be a problem when we need the Reagan Democrats in November.

Same with the dirty mailer Hillary sent to NH women on choice issues and the present votes which were part of an Illinois Planned Parenthood strategy.

Posted by bob | January 17, 2008 5:43 PM