There's a pretty intense (and terrific) fight brewing over budgetary issues right now - a fight whose contours are tilting the terms of debate away from Reaganism and toward progressive policy goals.
Over the last few weeks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) has been escalating her demand for the Obama administration to back an immediate repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the top one percent of all income earners. Like progressive leaders in states across the country, Pelosi is fearlessly using her bully pulpit to try to shift the terms of the tax debate away from the fringe right's framing and toward the real center of American public opinion, which supports efforts to make taxes more fair and better fund public priorities.
The Bush tax cuts are set to expire in two years, so it's easy to think that this isn't really that big of an issue. Why not just avoid the fight over repeal, as Obama wants? What's two years, right? Well, sure - two years may be a relatively short period of time, but as Citizens for Tax Justice data shows, it's not a relatively small amount of money. Indeed, the Bush tax cuts are set to give a whopping $226 billion to the top 1 percent of income earners in that time. That's $226 billion that could be spent on pressing priorities.
At a time when top Democrats on Capitol Hill are telling us the Obama administration is prioritizing more tax cuts over critical mass transit funding, and at a time when Obama has tried to focus deficit concerns almost exclusively on Social Security and Medicare while simultaneously pushing a massive bailout for Wall Street, simply ignoring a fight over $226 billion because it's politically easier to let Bush's tax cuts expire rather than repeal them is irresponsible, to say the least. That's especially true considering the data that says we could much more effectively spend that tax money on public infrastructure spending rather than tax cuts.
That said, while Obama's economic team is wrong on taxes, there's something to be excited about. What's different in this new political era is how the terms of the debate have radically shifted. The debate is now about whether to let the Bush tax cuts expire, or whether to repeal them right now - not about whether to extend them or let them expire, or worse, whether to extend them as is, or expand them. The latter set of arguments would undoubtedly be center-stage had John McCain won the presidency.
I hope Pelosi keeps pushing hard for legislation to repeal Bush's tax cuts - and I hope Obama's economic team stops embracing conservatives' discredited ideology that says any tax increases on the super rich would hurt the economy. $225 billion could go a long way to, say, universal health care. But while we push for immediate action, let's take a moment and recognize that
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