That's right - The REPUBLICAN Tax increases! The next time a Democrat says, "extend the Bush tax cuts", I'm gonna puke! The phrase that should be coming out of every Democratic mouth for the next 6 weeks is WE ARE GOING TO STOP THE REPUBLICAN TAX INCREASE.
As far as I can tell, the only Democrat to say this so far is Steny Hoyer. Why no one else picked up on it I have no idea. We should be saying it every friggin' day. Even Republicans have figured out this is the right framing for the issue.
Remember Rudy Giuliani and 9/11? A lesson in messaging all Dems should take to heart. Continue below the fold....
The Republican President and Congress of 2001 diabolically set our economy up for an double-whammy – \ housing bubble bursting (caused by absentee Republican regulators in the financial sector) causing the massive recession with widespread unemployment (which not coincidentally hit after our President and Congress finally took over) coinciding with the timing of a massive tax increase that will take effect next year.
Democrats must cast themselves as middle class heroes, saving the real Joe Plumbers from seeing their rates raised in 2011, if they hope to have a chance in this year's midterms. It's a Republican tax increase, and if Republicans stand in the way of the Democrats taking legislative action to void it, Republicans will be responsible for raising everyone’s taxes.
That’s the message in a nutshell all. Democrats need to send daily to the media and the people.
However Democrats must go beyond just halting the massive REPUBLICAN MIDDLE CLASS TAX INCREASE favor increasing taxes for the rich. The tax cut for the top 3.4% of earners in this country threw money into yachts and Swiss bank accounts of millionaires and billionaires who far and away have reaped the major benefits of the historically low tax rates of the last decade.
The statistics are stark. All of the economic growth and increase in wealth in the past 10 years has occurred at the top of the economic pyramid. The rich have become fabulously rich, the well-to-do wealthy, but the strivers and the strugglers of the middle and working classes have been shafted. If anyone is perpetrating class warfare in this country, it is the rich who have spent the last 30 years draining vast amounts of wealth from the middle class. (The poor were poor then and are still poor today.) Democrats must make this point ceaselessly and encourage the middle class to finally fight back.
Republicans, who hypocritically claim to be in favor of fiscal discipline, now have a 30-year track record of doing less than nothing to cut spending. Their fiscal policy can very accurately be described as "cut taxes and spend anyway," leading to the massive deficits as far as the eye can see.
So Democrats need to turn the language around to work in their favor. On January 1, 2011, a massive Republican tax increase is set to take effect. Democrats can stop it, but can't agree to anymore giveaways to the rich.
STOP THE REPUBLICAN TAX INCREASES, and finally put an end to 30 years of REPUBLICAN cut-tax-and-spend anyway nonsense.
Furthermore, we should propose, concurrently, a new Democratic tax increase on the very rich. Not the $250,000 level – we’ll just let the REPUBLICAN tax increase take care of them – but on the $500,000 level and the $1,000,000 level and the $5,000,000 level and the $10,000,000 level. And let’s index capital gains, too. The absurdly low level we are at now, 8%, has to go, but even the 15% that is coming ain’t enough for people who make millions. After the first $250,000, all capital gains ought to just be taxed at ordinary rates. It would make a huge impact on the deficit and would only effect the very, very wealthy.