Kevin Drum is right to say that "[Obama's] cornerstone is a platform of huge tax cuts, which he's been publicizing with massive advertising blitzes in every battleground state in the country...I would really, really like to think that Obama has found the magic bullet for fighting the tax cut loonies at the Journal and the Club for Growth, but the evidence just doesn't back it up. Unfortunately for the cause of liberalism, he's chosen instead to cave in and fight entirely on their turf. This is almost certainly a tactically wise decision, but it's not something progressives should be very happy about." If you look at the Obama campaign, the basic argument has been...tax cuts. Their biggest economic policy is a massive tax cut. Their health care argument has largely been a tax-based attack on John McCain. Their stimulus proposal was a tax cut. Now, these are not Republican tax cuts: They're decidedly progressive. The Obama campaign is taking advantage of the unequal distribution of wealth in this country, which allows you to drop taxes sharply on the vast majority of Americans while raising them modestly on a small minority and not blow a hole in your budget. They've realized, in other words, that cutting taxes on most people is what folks want in a tax cut. Aggregate revenues don't have to go down. And when the top one percent control 20 percent of the country's income, you can make up a lot of revenue by taxing them a bit. But tactically smart though this decision may be, it's not exactly the sort of thing that pleases the Gods of Public Policy. This country needs more in the way of tax revenues. The Republicans have turned honesty on that score into a form of electoral suicide. The Obama campaign -- and thus the Democrats more generally -- have basically thrown up their hands and said "fine." If Republicans are going to demagogue taxes and make irresponsible cuts a constant feature of elections, then the Democrats will prove that two can play at that game. Politically, that may be wise. But it's going to make the eventual reckoning much worse.
