re: #15 DelusionDeluge

It’s easy for any non-hack to identify the rise of Limbaugh and the Lewinsky hearings in the 90s as the beginning of our national divide and end of the Republican party of Reagan. It is amazing that Barack Obama, president precisely because of this strategy and it’s flowering in late-90s/early 2000s, is blamed for our nation’s divisions. The lack of self-reflection is alarming and sociopathic. Particularly when you consider the concessions Obama has made to conservatives these last four years. When all the House has to do to meet him is let the Bush tax cuts expire, raising the rate 3% on any income over $250,000, and they won’t do it out of spite, that’s a party that deserves to lose by landslides for infinity.

Would it suffice to let the Bush tax cuts expire (as well as raise rates on 250K+), but write the new law so that apart from this 250K+ tax bump, it’s an inflation-indexed version of the pre-Bush-tax-cut code? Because if there’s no adjustment for inflation, then in real terms, taxes pop to levels considerably higher than they were just before the Bush tax cuts.

The Obama proposal now on the table is not, not in any real sense, a return to an earlier state of affairs.