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Republicans and the Middle Class

Published: September 13, 2010

But it was refreshing to hear a Republican leader say that he could conceivably vote for any bill supported by President Obama. Perhaps the man the Republicans hope will be speaker of the House felt some pressure from Mr. Obama’s recent efforts to remind Americans that the Republicans were proposing to sacrifice the middle-class Americans, yet again, in the name of failed trickle-down economics.

For months, Republican leaders have been uniform in their insistence that they would allow everyone’s taxes to rise if the rich did not get to keep their Bush-era tax breaks. Mr. Obama has proposed continuing the tax cut for the 98 percent of taxpaying families earning less than $250,000 while allowing the tax rates for the top 2 percent to return to their levels prior to the Bush administration. Republicans have demanded tax cuts for all, and, so far, not a single Republican leader has lined up behind Mr. Boehner’s concession.

Even his deputy, Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, issued a no-compromise statement on Monday demanding a “clean bill,” which means one that would make no distinction between tax cuts for the rich and for everyone else. Anything short of that, he said, is a “nonstarter.” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, introduced a bill on Monday that would extend the tax cuts indefinitely for everyone, including the wealthiest Americans. He may well be joined by Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, and a few conservative Democrats.

But we hope Mr. Boehner would not be the only Republican to refuse to allow middle-class tax rates to rise, as they are scheduled to do at the end of this year. Even if it gave Democrats something to crow about, cutting those rates makes economic sense during a recession (though we disagree with Mr. Obama’s plan to cut the rates permanently). Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.

Ultimately, the case for the top-level tax cuts is increasingly shaky. If Republicans are the least bit serious about reducing the deficit, they have to acknowledge that doing so requires additional revenues, $700 billion of which would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners in the next decade if their taxes do not rise. Handing out those revenues to the rich would have little stimulative effect on the economy because those taxpayers tend to save rather than spend their marginal income.

Mr. Cantor and other hard-line tax-cutters like to claim that the high-end cuts would go to small businesses and other “job creators.” But they should listen carefully to another of Mr. Boehner’s surprising acknowledgments on Sunday. Under sharp questioning from Bob Schieffer on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Boehner admitted that only 3 percent of small businesses would pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s proposal. As the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation recently reported, 97 percent of the taxpayers with business income would get a cut under Mr. Obama’s plan.

That is something that Republicans simply do not say out loud; it would add inconvenient facts to a battle that they prefer to wage at a purely emotional level. But Mr. Obama’s efforts to enact a reasonable tax policy are not just good politics. They make good sense.