Tax battle: The Democrats’ risky tactic

last updated 8 January 2015

Democrats are learning to love the “fiscal cliff,” said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com. The Bush-era tax cuts will expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress acts. Republicans want the cuts to be made permanent, while President Obama wants the richest Americans to pay more. The chances of a deal are slim, but Democrats are beginning to realize that “they have the stronger hand.” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said last week that her party might embrace a tactic that begins with letting all the tax cuts expire. That “nuclear option” may in fact be “our best hope” for arriving at sensible compromise, said Bill Keller in The New York Times. It would almost certainly force the Republicans, at the beginning of next year, to join Democrats in retroactively restoring tax cuts for all but the richest 2 percent of Americans—and they wouldn’t have to breach their no-tax pledge to do it, since they’d effectively be cutting taxes. The question is whether Democrats have the sangfroid to “dig in their heels and do nothing.”

Surely they aren’t that foolish, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Letting all the Bush tax cuts expire would suck $400 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets, and that prospect alone would push the economy “close to recession territory.” Voters recognize this as partisan gamesmanship, and they won’t reward Democrats for being “willing to toy with recession to win an election.” That’s why Obama should distance himself from “leftist dead-enders” like Murray, said Michael Medved in TheDailyBeast.com, and instead broker a deal with Republicans to avert “Taxmageddon.” Showing bold leadership to protect taxpayers from fiscal crisis is surely a better electoral strategy than threatening to capsize the economy to “score ideological points.”

But Republicans “don’t seem interested in bargaining,” said the Los Angeles Times. Their solution for the fiscal cliff is to pass partisan bills that cut Democratic priorities in order to fund Republican ones. Now the Democrats are trying to beat them at their own game. The danger here is that lawmakers will “spend the rest of the year posturing” instead of hammering out a deal. Inaction would “impose five months of tax uncertainty” on the nation, said Jac Wilder VerSteeg in the Palm Beach, Fla., Post, slowing our economic growth and risking another bond-rating downgrade. Members of both parties should be running away from the cliff and toward a compromise. “Any who don’t have less sense than lemmings.”