Despite the bipartisan tax cuts orchestrated by the White House and Congress - and heralded by most Wall Street analysts! - in December, calls for tax hikes by liberal news outlets will be prevalent in the new year.
Confirming this was the New York Times on Sunday pounding this drum with predictable certitude in an editorial simply titled "The Economy in 2011":
The economy is growing, but for many Americans life is not getting better. Unemployment remains high. Home values are depressed. And state budgets are in deep trouble, presaging more layoffs, service cuts and tax increases.
The question for 2011 is whether growth will ever translate into broad prosperity.
For that to happen, the federal government must ensure that the recovery does not falter for lack of adequate stimulus, while fostering job-creating industries and committing itself to long-term deficit reduction.
With corporate profits robust and a one-year payroll tax cut set to start this month, there are reasons to hope for continued growth in 2011.
Sounds reasonable, right? And the Times editorial board mostly remained so until the end:
The federal deficit must be addressed. But cutting too deep, too fast will stall the recovery. There will have to be painful cuts ahead, and everything will have to be on the table, including entitlements and defense. Despite what the Republicans claim, there is no way to tackle the deficit and keep growing without raising taxes.
President Obama will need to make that case clearly in 2011 and challenge politicians — from both parties — to do what is necessary to ensure real prosperity.
So after calling in former President Bill Clinton to assist him with telling the nation extending the Bush tax cuts was pivotal to getting the economy moving enough to actually create jobs - and that letting them expire would have been a financial disaster for the country! - Obama should now go before the American people and tell them taxes need to be raised to "ensure real prosperity?"
Didn't the two most-recent Democrat presidents tell us less than four weeks ago the opposite was true? Has raising tax rates ever caused prosperity?
Regardless of what media outlets like the Times think, it was not Clinton's 1993 tax hikes that created a booming economy that decade.
Consider that the Gross Domestic Product grew by 2.9 percent, 4.1 percent, 2.5 percent, and 3.7 percent respectively in the first four years of the Clinton administration. This is an average yearly GDP increase of 3.3 percent during his first term.
As the economy grew by 3.4 percent in 1992 before his tax hikes went into effect, it's specious to cite them as a cause of prosperity regardless of how often liberal media types do it.
More importantly though, when Speaker Newt Gingrich and a Republican Congress forced Clinton to implement a variety of spending cuts and finally cut taxes in 1997, the economy grew by 4.5 percent, 4.4 percent, 4.8 percent, and 4.1 percent respectively in the subsequent four years.
What liberal "journalists" have ignored for two decades is that the real prosperity during the Clinton years occurred after taxes and spending were cut. What they also conveniently forget is that the so-called budget surpluses that decade also happened after Gingrich and Company forced the President to do so.
Yet here we are years later with worse fiscal and economic conditions, and the Times predictably wants higher taxes.
Will folks like this ever learn, or is their redistributive agenda always going to trump reason?
