From the latest issue of National Review:Well, that didn’t take long: Just a few months into their majority, Senate Democrats are already itching to raise taxes. President Bush’s tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010. The Senate just passed a budget that extends the most popular of the tax cuts: notably the child credit and the tax-rate cut for low-income workers. But the budget also stipulated that if the other tax cuts are extended, too, they have to be balanced with tax increases or with cuts in entitlement programs. Since entitlements aren’t going to be cut by the requisite $900 billion over four years, that’s a recipe for a massive tax increase on dividends, capital gains, and high earners. If Democrats wanted to design a tax increase that did the most damage to economic growth for every dollar raised, they could hardly do better. This budget passed the Senate on a party-line vote, with only the Maine Republicans defecting to support it. President Bush may be down in the polls, but our guess is that the public will side with him if he stands up for taxpayers, as he should.
