God, Patriotism and Taxes
Joe Biden isn’t backing down from his startling claim last week that raising taxes on the rich is the “patriotic” thing to do. On Thursday he upped the ante, thundering that he also has Jesus in his corner. “Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most,” Mr. Biden preached to a group of union supporters on Thursday.
Heavens! The political left likes to score Republicans for claiming that God is on their side, but here we have Mr. Biden claiming support from both God and Caesar. If Sarah Palin tried this, she’d send the boys at the Daily Kos into cardiac arrest. We won’t get into a theological debate with Mr. Biden, except to say that Biblical tax rates tended to run around 10%, not the 39.6%-plus that Barack Obama’s tax plan calls for.
As for patriotism, maybe the young Joe Biden missed school the day the Boston Tea Party was being taught. There’s also the point that if you want to finance a war, you need a strong enough economy to throw off the tax revenues to pay for it. As we learned in the 1980s under Reagan, lower taxes that help an economy grow can finance a defense buildup that helps win the Cold War. By that standard, cuts in marginal income tax rates deserve to be called patriotic.