Wednesday, December 05, 2012

An Unfortunate Broken Promise

Back in 2008, when President Obama was running for his first term, he promised to be a post-partisan leader.  While a Democrat, he said he would accept good ideas when they came from Republicans.  At the time, I believed him, at least to some degree.  And I wrote about it in this NY Times column.

Sadly, I was wrong.  The short version of the story is this: As a candidate, President Obama campaigned on a platform of raising taxes on the rich.  Yet he and his economic advisers also said they wanted to raise dividend taxes only slightly, from 15 to 20 percent.  For reasons I explained in the Times article, keeping dividend taxes low was a position bolstered by good economics. Now, however, the president wants to raise dividend taxes to ordinary income tax rates (plus, for high-income taxpayers, the new tax of 3.8 percent that is part of the Obamacare legislation).

To put it another way, he campaigned as a moderate, willing to concede that the other party had some good ideas on tax policy.  Once in office, he gave up on those ideas.

A similar thing happened with Bowles-Simpson.  During his first term, he appointed a bipartisan panel, which concluded we could address our long-term fiscal problem with lower tax rates and a broader tax base.  Now, the President goes around the country lambasting that approach.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether President Obama is a good or bad president.  But the claim that he has tried to transcend partisanship and find a middle ground is just impossible to square with the facts.