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Hillary Clinton's pledge to avoid middle-class tax hikes is bad news for progressive politics (Vox)
Hillary Clinton — like Barack Obama before her — wants voters to know that however much she may favor defending and expanding useful federal programs, she won't be asking the 97 percent or so of American households that earn less than $250,000 a year. She's so eager to make this known, she's even made it a point of pride in her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders.
The bar on middle-class tax hikes is the perfect policy stance for a 21st-century Democrat, blending timidity in the face of the public's skepticism about tax hikes with boldness in the face of the liberal base's rage about income inequality. And directionally it's the right idea. A huge share of the income gains over the past generation have gone to a tiny minority of high-income households, so those are the ones who are going to have to pay the bulk of the tab for useful new investments.
But offered as a formal Grover Norquist–style pledge, the way Barack Obama and Clinton have, it's also destructive of the long-term possibilities of progressive governance. The best and most effective American (and, for that matter, foreign) social programs are used — and paid for — by everyone, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps them reasonably effective and reasonably popular. Democratic communications professionals — including people who've worked for Obama and people who currently work for Clinton — swear the tax pledge is a political necessity. If that's true, it also speaks to a certain amount of intellectual bankruptcy in contemporary American liberalism. It's an ideology that stands for the creation of new government programs but won't stand up for the idea that these programs are actually sufficiently valuable to ask people to pay for them.
The bar on middle-class tax hikes is the perfect policy stance for a 21st-century Democrat, blending timidity in the face of the public's skepticism about tax hikes with boldness in the face of the liberal base's rage about income inequality. And directionally it's the right idea. A huge share of the income gains over the past generation have gone to a tiny minority of high-income households, so those are the ones who are going to have to pay the bulk of the tab for useful new investments.
But offered as a formal Grover Norquist–style pledge, the way Barack Obama and Clinton have, it's also destructive of the long-term possibilities of progressive governance. The best and most effective American (and, for that matter, foreign) social programs are used — and paid for — by everyone, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps them reasonably effective and reasonably popular. Democratic communications professionals — including people who've worked for Obama and people who currently work for Clinton — swear the tax pledge is a political necessity. If that's true, it also speaks to a certain amount of intellectual bankruptcy in contemporary American liberalism. It's an ideology that stands for the creation of new government programs but won't stand up for the idea that these programs are actually sufficiently valuable to ask people to pay for them.
more..
http://www.vox.com/2015/11/23/9780162/clinton-middle-class-tax
4 replies
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that she will "evolve" on an issue.
