The Heritage Foundation
December 13, 2010
Any piece of legislation must be both constitutional and improve the condition of the American people. When President Obama and Congressional Republicans first announced their tax deal early last week, our reaction was to hold our noses against its bad elements; on balance, we thought the extension of the current tax rates was laudable. Now, however, the full text of the bill has been released and we see all the bad things that were in the original deal. Meanwhile, liberals in Congress are walking away even from that deal, and are holding the country hostage to their hatred of those they call “the rich.” The tax cut deal, we now know, has been so freighted with liberal special interest tax giveaways that true conservatives cannot support it in good faith.
The blame for this state of affairs will be on the left. Tax rates will go up on all Americans on Jan. 1, hitting a country beset with 10 percent unemployment and a stagnant economy. It’s baffling that, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left has held fast to its belief that penalizing success will somehow incentivize hard work and produce wealth.
If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid engineer this massive a tax increase in a faltering economy, they will join two Republicans -- Reed Smoot of Utah and Willis Hawley of Oregon -- in the pantheon of economic fools. Before they do so, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid should consider that history has still not forgiven their predecessors for the Smoot-Hawley tariff that led to the Great Depression.
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