By James Kwak
Mark Thoma provides an excerpt from Noam Scheiber on Peter Orszag’s attempt to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. In short, Orszag wanted to extend the “middle-class” tax cuts for two years (letting the tax cuts for the rich expire); then he expected the middle-class tax cuts to expire as well. President Obama was interested in the plan, which Scheiber takes as evidence that “the president is a true fiscal conservative.”
Thoma frames this as a bad thing:
“The explanation, of course, is that despite hopes to the contrary (and denial by some), the president is, ‘a true fiscal conservative’ — it’s not just an act in an attempt to capture the middle — and that could be bad news not just for middle class tax cuts, but also for important social insurance programs such as Social Security.”
I like and respect Mark Thoma a great deal, and I generally think of him as a mainstream Democrat on economic issues, neither a socialist nor a “moderate Democrat” (what we used to call a Republican). To me, his post is evidence that many Democrats think that most of the Bush tax cuts were an are a good thing. This confuses me. When did we become the party of tax cuts?