The Tax Cuts for the Rich Again
Jules Witcover

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's walkout from the bipartisan talks on raising the debt ceiling gives President Obama a second shot at what can be a potent political issue for the Democrats -- ending the Bush tax cuts and other breaks for the rich.

The president blinked at his first effort to kill them in the first round on deficit reduction following the November midterm congressional elections that turned the House over to the Republicans and gave Cantor a larger megaphone. Obama on that occasion surrendered to the GOP blackmail of holding middle-class tax cuts hostage unless he agreed to extend them for the wealthy as well.

Cantor's rationale for quitting the debt-ceiling talks was the Democrats' insistence on dropping the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich as part of the quest for deep deficit reduction. The Republicans insist on keeping those tax cuts as their condition for agreeing to raise the federal debt limit, without which the country would go into default.

Retaining all tax cuts is Cantor's non-negotiable condition, quickly echoed by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as the deadline of early August approaches for avoiding the financial abyss. All three called for Obama to jump into the negotiations himself, after reports of considerable progress under Vice President Joe Biden.

Cantor afterward praised Biden's leadership but said that "regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue most be resolved before discussions can continue." McConnell said it was clear "from the beginning that tax hikes would be a poison pill to any debt-reduction proposal," adding that their advocates "now either know this or they need to realize it quickly."

Biden, keeping a low profile as moderator of the negotiations, pleaded for a "balanced approach" but added "we all need to make sacrifices, and that includes the most fortunate among us."

The Cantor walkout triggers a partisan escalation that Obama should seize to resume the case for squeezing the favored rich that he failed convincingly to make in the first go-around. The current economic circumstances cry out even louder now for Obama to hammer the Republicans on shielding their fat-cat supporters from a greater obligation to help spur the national recovery.

Predictably, the president's insistence that the tax breaks for the rich be ended or sharply trimmed, which the Republicans call tax increases, will resurrect the cry of class warfare -- that is, that he is again pitting the middle class and the poor against better-off Americans. It's a laughable inversion of the reality, in which the top 1 or 2 percent of citizens on the income scale are reaping ever-increasing profits in an otherwise stalled economy.

Equally laughable is the argument of Cantor and his cohorts that taking away the tax cuts for the rich will impede their ability to fire up the nation's economic engine and produce major job creation. Major corporations and their executives continue to sit on huge cash stockpiles rather than hiring, saying they're awaiting evidence that increased production will find a market to justify the action.

At a time the American public is expressing in the polls impatience and weariness toward elected officials' partisanship, Cantor's showboat walking away from the Biden-led bipartisan talks is risky political business.

Although the Democrats have already indicated readiness to go along with spending cuts of $2 trillion or more over the next ten years, Cantor's willingness to scuttle the talks gives Obama a strong hand to paint the Republicans again as obstructionists. While it didn't work very well for him in the self-styled shellacking he took at the polls last November, the argument should take on greater resonance as the debt-ceiling deadline grows nearer.

Obama and Boehner made a symbolic show of bipartisanship a week ago in playing golf. But such gestures are no substitute for compromise of the sort that Cantor's walkout imperils. House Democrats visiting with Obama on Thursday urged him to dig in against continuing the tax cuts for the rich. The question is whether he will do so, or blink again and risk more discontent in his own party.

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