Will the evident eagerness of the Democratic presidential candidates to raise taxes will hurt the party and its eventual nominee in the 2008 general election? Yes, predicts syndicated columnist Donald Lambro.
Virtually all the Democratic presidential contenders have denounced President Bush's tax cuts and called for raising the rates on wealthier Americans, but Republican strategists say their plan will backfire in the 2008 election.
Bashing the Bush tax cuts as "tax cuts for the wealthy" has become the favorite Democratic mantra ever since he enacted his across-the-board tax-reduction plan in 2001 -- which included increased tax credits for families with children and lower tax rates for every income bracket.
Every Democrat seeking the presidential nomination who was in Congress at the time voted against the Bush tax cuts and has called for repealing some of the income-tax rate reductions if they are elected president. Most say their tax increases would hit only the very wealthiest Americans earning more than $200,000 a year.
Republican tax-cut advocates say: "Don't believe it."
If the Democrats campaign on raising taxes just for people at the top tax rate, "it will backfire on them for two reasons," said economic strategist Cesar Conda, a former chief domestic policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"Number one: A lot of small businesses, small proprietorships, pay the top individual tax rate, so they will be raising taxes on small businesses and entrepreneurs. Number two: A lot of the polls I've seen suggest that the American people don't believe that the Democratic tax increases will stop at just the rich, that eventually it will hit the middle class," Mr. Conda said.
"The Democrats are falling into the trap of becoming the tax-and-spend party again," said Mr. Conda, now a private consultant and economic adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2008 Republican presidential candidate.
It isn't just Republicans saying so. Lambro reports that "some Democrats are also cautioning their party's presidential aspirants to be careful how they present their tax proposals to the voters next year."
James Kessler, issues director for the Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group, says Democrats "have to define themselves as proponents in the battle for the middle class, so that any tax increases they espouse, like rolling back part of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, should be used primarily for middle class tax cuts."
While "tax cuts" continue to fire up the GOP base, they are becoming less and less powerful as a political campaign strategy primarily because the Bush tax cuts in the last six years have removed tens of millions of lower-income Americans from the income tax rolls.
But I don't see a scenario in which promising to raise taxes on "the wealthy" is a winning political strategy, either. Millions of middle class taxpayers see themselves as someday being among the wealthy, and they don't want to be excessively taxed when they get there.
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