If you want a general idea for why the entire political media seems horny for Trump to be back… https://t.co/Oz9B2LoDRk — Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) March 27, 2024 the New York Times is now running op-eds insisting Joe Biden is unpopular in *another country.* (The only current polling the op-ed cites in support of …
Open Thread: The Blissfully Boring Biden AdministrationPost + Comments (83)
As my Irish granny would’ve said, he’ll live, and do well of it:
Despite voters’ doubts about Joe Biden and the economy, the president is pushing an “idea that would once have been almost unthinkable,” writes @FeliciaWongRI. “He is vowing — almost gleefully — to raise taxes” on the rich.
Read: https://t.co/0H7CYmO5kf
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) March 27, 2024
A rather different ‘guest essay’ — Felicia Wong, “Biden Is Breaking Campaign Rule No. 1. And It Just Might Work.” [gift link]:
Should we have trillionaires? Should we even have billionaires? According to at least one recent analysis, the economy is on track to mint its first trillionaire — that is 1,000 billion — within a decade. Such staggering accumulations of wealth are made possible in large part by the fact that America’s federal tax burden is so comparatively light. After a long period of seeming to venerate the 1 percent, or the 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent, American sentiment is swinging hard against this imbalance.
Now President Biden, behind in many polls and with an economy that is objectively strong but politically unpopular, is hoping to boost his re-election bid with a policy idea that would once have been almost unthinkable: For this portion of the population, at least, he is vowing — almost gleefully — to raise taxes.
Even for a popular president, this would seem like a huge risk. For a Democrat with low job approval ratings and precarious poll numbers on his handling of the economy, it’s a shocking rebuke to conventional wisdom — and practically an invitation to critics to call him a tax-and-spend liberal. But on the politics as well as the policy, Mr. Biden is making the right call. Economic ideas that were once dead on arrival are now gaining traction on both the left and the right. The moment has arrived for changes in the tax code — and maybe beyond…
Anti-tax activists made cutting taxes an explicit political litmus test. In 1988, George H.W. Bush famously pledged, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Twenty-five years later, Barack Obama modestly raised taxes on the highest-earning Americans, but he kept quiet about it, instead touting middle-class tax cuts that, he said, left middle-income families with a lower tax rate than at “almost any other period in the last 60 years.”
Fast-forward to Mr. Biden, who is making $5 trillion in tax increases central to his re-election campaign. During his State of the Union speech this month, he even made fun of Republicans for favoring cuts. Getting the rich to pay their share is right up there with getting greedy companies to stop charging you junk fees and, he said, shrinking your Snickers bars.
What explains the pivot? The president is following the money. Over the past decade and even more since the pandemic, wealth concentration has shot up astonishingly. Elon Musk was worth about $25 billion in 2020 and at the end of 2023 was worth almost 10 times that. In 1990 there were nearly 70 American billionaires. Today there are nearly 700. To what earthly end are we encouraging trillionaires?…
Could we get past the sense that taxes are what the government takes and toward an idea of taxes as a means of patriotism, a kitty we all pay into to build something for community use: a school, a library, a road, a college, a hospital? What if taxation could bring us all together? It’s not that wild an idea. As the political scientist Vanessa Williamson notes, both liberal and conservative Americans view paying taxes as a moral duty. Just think of the pride with which people refer to themselves as taxpayers.
Of course, taxes are a civic good only if the tax rules are perceived as being fair. Which is why Mr. Biden’s calculated risk could pay many dividends come November.
Peter Baker weeps into a starched linen hankie. Them dear, departed days!…
No truer words pic.twitter.com/DlIBv8Cmt8
— AlwaysOnVacation (@AlwaysOnVacati3) March 27, 2024