The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Outfoxing the Right on Taxes

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) had a column in the Wall Street Journal last week that shows how well he earned his keep as senior advisor to President Clinton on policy and strategy:

By arguing over which piece of George W. Bush's tax cut they would retain or rescind, the Democratic presidential candidates are passing up a big political and economic opportunity. The candidates should stop rearranging the Bush tax cuts and start proposing fundamental reform of the tax code.

... Democrats need to become the party of tax reform and make President Bush own the cumbersome and regressive tax code he has created. The theme of the Bush tax code is this: With the help of their accountants and lawyers, the special interests win subsidies, shelters and loopholes, while middle-class families are buried under a crushing tax burden and piles of complicated IRS forms.

... Elections are about the future not the past. An argument about the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would force Democrats into two strategic traps. First, they would forfeit the mantel of owning the future and would mire us in an argument about the past. Second, we would be walking into the president's argument on tax cuts versus tax increases. Wholesale tax reform enables the Democrats to frame the presidential election on our terms while sidestepping the political landmines his tax cuts have set for us.

... With the code now spanning more than 45,000 pages, Democratic support for fundamental tax reform should go hand-in-hand with calls for simplification. ... It should also be framed as a values argument. As the scope of tax avoidance reaches massive proportions, we are left with one set of rules and obligations for the middle class and a far different set for special interests.

That analysis is right on, and any Democrat who wants to beat the Republican playbook next year ought to read it. In fact, I'm kicking myself because I had wanted to write a post on the same note over the summer, to make the point that while Howard Dean staked out sound positions on the Iraq war, health care, and a host of other issues, his line on the Bush tax cuts — he wants them repealed — seems politically tone deaf.

Democrats never win by waging battles for higher taxes. The party needs to stay away giving Bush a chance to raise that prospect, because it makes no sense to fight a campaign on Republican terms. By framing the debate instead around the need to make the tax code fairer, Democrats would create an opportunity to throw President Bush on the defensive, by forcing a conversation about issues — the president's perceived slavishness to friends in the business community, his lackadaisical response to the corporate scandals — that touch on doubts already in the public mind.

Polls show us a public ready to debate tax fairness, in fact, if only a candidate would make the pitch.

• More than half of Americans, NPR says, consider the tax code so riddled with flaws that "Congress should completely overhaul it."
• People trust Democrats more than Republicans by healthy margins, according to a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll [*.pdf], to make the tax code fairer, to get rid of loopholes and shelters, and to lower the tax burden on middle-class and wealthy families alike.
• Solid majorities of Americans [*.pdf] strongly support junking language in the tax code that allows companies to relocate to offshore havens, and eliminating the cap that protects income above $87,000 per year from Social Security taxes — while less than half show the same ardor for making the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Democrats can talk about taxes next year, then — but they shouldn't do it in a fashion that leaves the party wide open to Republican attacks. If the party can pre-empt the hackneyed debate over making taxes low by firing a broadside against the Republicans' failure to make them fairer, the Democrats might rob the GOP of a key advantage in next year's campaign.

Posted by Greg Greene at October 22, 2003 2:54 PM