September 23, 2011
President Obama wants to raise the tax rate on the wealthy back to the levels of the Clinton years, still leaving them 10 percentage points lower than the rates set in President Reagan’s tax cuts. Charles Krauthammer confronts the threat.
Krauthammer warns of “a $1.5 trillion tsunami of tax hikes.” (The tsunami is equal to approximately 0.7 percent of projected GDP or less than half of the Iraq-Afghan war induced increase in military spending.)
He then tells us that Obama’s tax plans make him “today’s soak-the-rich, veto-threatening, self-proclaimed class warrior.” Krauthammer goes on to call President Obama “a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the redistributionist state.”
Along the way he also calls President Obama’s adoption of the 1990s Heritage Foundation health care plan “the quasi-nationalization of one-sixth of the economy that is health care” and also denounces a stimulus package that was roughly the same size as the Bush tax cuts as “the largest Keynesian stimulus in recorded history.” (I guess Bush didn’t think of his tax cuts as “Keynesian.”)
Pretty strong stuff here, imagine what Krauthammer would be calling Obama if he proposed to return to Reagan’s 50 percent top marginal tax rate.
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