Harold Meyerson - The Blue Dogs' Can't-Do Attitude and the Health-Care Debate - washingtonpost.com
When your side has a 60 vote Senate advantage, it is hard to dodge responsibility for governing. When you are liberal, your idea of government is "Gimme That Thing ... and make someone else pay".
Who ought to pay? Well, that "wealthiest 1% of course".
People that are lucky enough to have multi-decade successful careers, stable marriages, good investments, good health, successful private businesses or other such "good things" SOMETIMES get to the point were they get to that "1%" when they are in their late 40s or 50s. Since they got to that point, they paid high tax rates all the way through their lives and get to pay the full cost (and part of the cost of a few others) of their kids education in college along with full cost on anything else that is "income adjusted". That was SUPPOSED to be "the American dream". Many decades of hard work gave one the CHANCE to get A FEW EARNING YEARS in that upper level of income.
Now it is evil to get there, so there ought to be huge tax penalties that treat the folks that managed to succeed as some sort of a "redistributionist pinata"
I don't think so. Making high income is very hard. Cutting ones income is very easy. Nobody that got to the top 1% is stupid enough to send in well over half of the money they earn to the feds so it can be spent on the "pork of the day". If those awful "Blue Dogs" lose and Mr Meyerson "wins", then what we are going to see is an "easy chair revolt".
When your side has a 60 vote Senate advantage, it is hard to dodge responsibility for governing. When you are liberal, your idea of government is "Gimme That Thing ... and make someone else pay".
Who ought to pay? Well, that "wealthiest 1% of course".
To today's centrist Democrats, this has become a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual individuals might have to pay to secure the national interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation's households. Their deference to wealth -- whether the consequence of our system of funding elections or a byproduct of the Internet generation's experience of free access to information and entertainment -- is not to be trifled with.
People that are lucky enough to have multi-decade successful careers, stable marriages, good investments, good health, successful private businesses or other such "good things" SOMETIMES get to the point were they get to that "1%" when they are in their late 40s or 50s. Since they got to that point, they paid high tax rates all the way through their lives and get to pay the full cost (and part of the cost of a few others) of their kids education in college along with full cost on anything else that is "income adjusted". That was SUPPOSED to be "the American dream". Many decades of hard work gave one the CHANCE to get A FEW EARNING YEARS in that upper level of income.
Now it is evil to get there, so there ought to be huge tax penalties that treat the folks that managed to succeed as some sort of a "redistributionist pinata"
I don't think so. Making high income is very hard. Cutting ones income is very easy. Nobody that got to the top 1% is stupid enough to send in well over half of the money they earn to the feds so it can be spent on the "pork of the day". If those awful "Blue Dogs" lose and Mr Meyerson "wins", then what we are going to see is an "easy chair revolt".
