In this time of emergency, President Obama needs to add a word to his working vocabulary: sacrifice.
Sacrifice is an important American tradition that embraces the virtues of patriotism, puts national interest ahead of self-interest, and encourages everyone to share the burden in perilous times.
President Kennedy's call for sacrifice in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country," earned universal praise. It was a declaration for Americans to sacrifice to win the Cold War and the emerging space competition with the Soviet Union.
During World War II, President Roosevelt asked Americans to accept their individual responsibility, from putting their lives at risk in battle to accepting food and gas rationing to collecting tin cans that would be recycled for the war effort. The spirit of the messages that flooded his office, he said, is, "What more can I do to help my country in winning this war?"
After September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to summon the nation to sacrifice in addressing its energy, education and fiscal problems, he foolishly advised the country to go shopping.
In Washington, a lame-duck session of Congress has begun with an agenda that includes a looming battle over the extension of the Bush-era personal income tax cuts.
This is the moment for President Obama to call for sacrifice, the moment to tell the nation he is going to let all of the tax cuts expire; not just the tax cuts for the wealthy, the tax cuts for all of us. He should tell the Congress that he will veto a bill that extends any part of the tax cuts. This is an executive decision. It is one of the few he can take without approval of Congress.
The president can use the bully pulpit of his office to say we all are in this financial crisis together and letting the tax cuts expire across the board is a sacrifice we all can make. Everyone will share in our national pain. He can explain this as a necessary step that will reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.
It is hard to ask Americans to accept higher personal income tax rates in difficult times. If the tax cuts were to expire, the rates that would be effective in 2011 are not onerous. They are rates by which Americans paid income taxes during the 1990s, when the economy was doing well and the government was moving toward a balanced budget.
For many Americans, Barack Obama's election was uplifting. He represented the hope of restoring the country's virtues of civility, innovation and compromise. The president has struggled with these ideals against the partisanship that has gripped our government. He understands that America's greatness is at risk and that the Washington gridlock is contributing to this. Asking each of us who pays income taxes to share in the sacrifice is a necessarily bold act he can take now that will make a difference.
President Obama has at his command an eloquence to engage Americans in a discussion about why we must sacrifice now. He can go out across in the country to make his case in town meetings, asking citizens for their ideas about how we can sacrifice to get our deficit under control and our country back on the right track. He can use his political skills to begin a movement, as the columnist David Brooks has urged, that would be organized around love of country. It is a movement that would once again elevate sacrifice as a noble American virtue and inspire citizens to ask what they can do to help.
This post originally appeared at Nieman Watchdog.
Second, once tax rates get DOWN to a certain level, government spending goes UP, dramatically, for the same reason that people buy more when products cost less.
I am all for Shared Sacrifice, but so far I have already sacrificed as have many of the Regular folks I know, so until I see millionaires and billionaires pony up, you can put me down as against raising taxes on the middle class.
I under no circumstance support tax breaks for the wealthy, and owuld rather pay more taxes then to let them rape this country some more
A better action is to let Bush cuts expire and reform the FICA payroll tax instead. We should establish a wage floor and remove the wage ceiling altogether - share the load equally among ALL income above poverty levels. Social Security benefits should be based simply on quarters employed, without a monetary value assigned to the work. Median wages have been suppressed by government action for 30 years - it is not the fault of the middle-class worker - so it is no longer valid to base benefits on income contribution. Social Security should be based on the simple fact that you had a job and worked.
Better yet, remove employers from paying a portion of FICA since the $106,800 wage ceiling restricts employment at small American businesses FAR MORE than it does for giant multinational corporations with offshore labor forces. If the FICA tax is applied to ALL individual income above poverty, the % RATE will drop significantly for everyone. This is why Medicare tax is only 1.45%.
Permanent payroll tax reform will deliver simple and meaningful middle-class relief and increase disposable income directly with the the middle-class. The result will be increased market demand, more jobs, economic growth - with no deficit expansion.
Upping the bar to $1 million dollars will get the Government most of the income they'd get with it set at $250k, and be a much easier sell with the public.
Watching MSNBC yesterday, the Democratic members of Congress they interviewed, to a person, said the phrase "millionaires and billionaires" - and when asked by the host if most of the families making over $250k a year were "millionaires and billionaires", one Congressman answered "yes", but provided no more info.
That's just not true - most of the tax cuts go to the very highest earners, who ARE millionaires and billionaires, but most of the families whose taxes will be raised are not even close to millionaires, and many do own small businesses (how many? - hard to tell, noone cites data, they just say "thats not true" or "yes it is", like schoolchildren).
Raising the bar to $1 million per family and extending the middle-class cuts is a winning strategy that will also bring in lots of cash. Why throw that out in attempt at ideological purity?
FDR had a war against an aggressive and powerful foe, and when JFK took office, the country was flourishing in the shared wealth of the post-war years. What we’re facing today is more akin to the years immediately following the Great Depression. There are MILLIONS of people who are already sacrificing. The right tactic for President Obama is the one he took when he spoke in Cleveland in September — tax cuts for 98% of Americans: http://bit.ly/a6SjcD.
The Democratic congressional leaders are ready to take up the fight, if the President will take a stand. The right message for the country right now is that there’s somebody in Washington who’s willing to stand up for the working people of our nation. The President needs to stand firm on tax cuts for average Americans, not for the rich, and as the debate ensues, the Democrats need to make it perfectly clear who’s on which side.
This is a slow pitch over the center of the plate. If the President strikes out looking, then the American people need to look for another leader. http://bit.ly/9RYVWW
I've only talked to a couple of small business owners about this, and they don't make enough to be affected one way or the other, but I'm curious what you mean - not being snarky or anything, I'm just curious.
Repeating slogans like "borrow from China to pay millionaires and billionaires", which seems to be the slogan of the week, doesn't do anything to advance the debate, or to change that fact.
Everyone knows that you can't set the tax rate at 100%, and expect anybody to put forth any effort to earn money. Conversely, a 0% rate wouldn't bring in any money.
So the "right" answer is somewhere in between. But where? And for whom?
Since this is the reality-based community, who base their decisions and facts and science and arguments, wouldn't it be nice if there were at least some logic to the system, so people would have some confidence in it?
Unfortunately, the tax code is nothing but the tool that allows the corrupt "leaders" in Congress to enrich themselves, their families and their friends - if you don't believe that, and think it is designed to efficiently and fairly collect needed revenues, you are just a little naive.
So when you feel the urge to repeat this week's slogan, slow down and think a little. Maybe the folks who fed you that slogan don't have your best interests at heart at all, but they are counting on you to repeat their meaningless slogans, rather than learn the dirty truth.