President Obama was criticized for proposing too many tax cuts up front in his stimulus package. Critics say he should have offered few, if any, tax cuts and then appear to compromise with GOPers by letting some modest cuts in the proposal.<\/p>\n
Now Matt Yglesias is arguing<\/a> the administration may have done the same with his budget proposal and its tax hikes on the rich.<\/p>\n I can see why they did it. The key administration players\u2014Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, Jason Furman, etc.\u2014are nothing if not reasonable, moderate people. But the key legislative<\/em> players aren\u2019t reasonable, moderate people they\u2019re \u201creasonable\u201d \u201cSenate moderates.\u201d A \u201cSenate moderate\u201d is someone who takes his party\u2019s proposals, objects to them, waters them down a bit, and then congratulates himself on a job well done. Which is great if his party\u2019s proposals are unduly immoderate. But it\u2019s big-time trouble if his party puts a reasonable, moderate agenda on the table. <\/p>\n After all, you don\u2019t maintain the painstakingly achieved Nelson\/Bayh \u201cSenate moderate\u201d brand by clapping politely. You need to bitch and moan and be quoted in inside-baseball only media outlets that none of your constituents pay attention to, and hold conferences and have meetings at the White House where people hold your hands. You need to be praised by the opposition party, and extract your pound of flesh from the proposal. Then when it looks like it might go down to defeat, you can vote for the somewhat-watered-down version and be the hero who saved the day and nobody will mention that you saved the day from yourself. <\/p>\n But I think that means that proposals need to deliberately overshoot the mark. Say Obama had proposed a top marginal tax rate of 43 percent. Well Evan Bayh couldn\u2019t stand for that! He might propose some reasonable alternative like letting the Bush tax cuts expire so that post-recession rates will be back where they were in the 1990s. How reasonable! How moderate! How judicious!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Well said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Obama was criticized for proposing too many tax cuts up front in his stimulus package. Critics say he should have offered few, if any, tax cuts and then appear to compromise with GOPers by letting some modest cuts in the proposal. Now Matt Yglesias is arguing the administration may have done the same with… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n