Let’s see what he does during the first 100 days. I hope it turns things around for the better. This writer thinks it would be political suicide to increase taxes, but others have done it on both sides of the political aisle.
Barack Obama won’t raise your taxes. At least not in 2009
“This is where things will begin to get interesting. Not in 2009. Maybe not even in 2010. But after that something has to give. Fiscal conservatives are likely to push–as the Tax Policy Center’s Len Burman already did Wednesday–for letting more of the Bush tax cuts (you know, those on the middle class) expire. With Obama already having said that we need to stop relying on consumer spending as the main engine of economic growth, also I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we start to hear serious talk of instituting some kind of consumption tax–either an across-the-board one like a VAT or something more targeted to energy and the environment. (I should add that I think this would probably be a good idea; but it is a tax increase.) And of course there will be lots of talk about what to do on the spending side, but don’t count on a whole lot of movement in the direction of cutbacks.”
“A big question is whether pushing through tax hikes to shrink the deficit would amount to political suicide. It has seemed to be for the past quarter century–probably costing George H.W. Bush the presidency in 1992 and Bill Clinton a friendly Congress in 1994. I’ve always thought this was terribly unfair: Both Bush and Clinton were simply reacting to fiscal problems created during the Reagan years. Just as any tax increases that Obama implements a couple of years down the road would be necessitated in part by his predecessor’s unwillingness to take fiscal policy seriously. Will voters get that? We’ll see.”
