Shell Game

The White House is floating the usual trial balloons in the Washington Post today discussing possible tax reform proposals. As expected, the proposals suck.

Actually, the proposals are completely unworkable in a political sense. Even with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, it's unlikely they'd be able to ignite popular support for some key changes, including:

1. Removing the deduction for state and local taxes.

2. Removing the deduction for employers providing health insurance to their employees.

Those ideas are supposed to keep the overall package revenue neutral, so that they can eliminate Capital Gains, Interest, and Dividend taxes. Yup, the Republican battle to make the poor and middle class suffer for their immoral non-richness continues.

The idiocy of these proposals isn't really the point of this exercise. The strategy behind them is. Putting these poison pills into any proposal formally introduced will just give a different target for Democrats to attack, which Republicans will end up conceding as long as Democrats give them their nice little tax cuts on investment income. Republicans then frame Dems as "pro-tax" and pin the blame for larger defecits on Democratic resistance to shifting the burden of government further onto the backs of the working class.

Democrats need to make sure their opposition to this is framed by them and not the Republicans, and they have to be the party of responsible government. This is about not bankrupting the government, and not screwing over an increasing marginalized middle-class. They shouldn't let themselves, or the public, be distracted by the repeated slight of hand of the Right. The whole agenda is rotten to the core, and that's the best way to approach this.

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