Democrats Are Obsessed With Raising Taxes

Debt Talks: The House-passed spending control plan rejected by the Senate is exactly what Republicans were elected to do last November. The president's obsession with tax increases repudiates the will of the people.

Like a headmaster in chief of some Dickensian orphanage, President Obama earlier this month told us to "eat our peas" — meaning accept the tax increases we know are good for us.

Socialism has always come down to contempt for the will of the people, to a benevolent elite force-feeding its enlightened policies down the throats of the masses.

Karl Marx himself once dismissed free elections as merely "deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament."

A CNN/ORC poll this week directly contradicted the media template that most Americans think tax increases are good for them. It found that 66% support the cut, cap and balance bill that passed the GOP-controlled House of Representatives but was killed in the Democrat-controlled Senate on Friday.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid called it "one of the worst pieces of legislation to be brought to the floor of the U.S. Senate." It "violates the spirit of our Constitution," he said. Why? One reason: The cut, cap, balance solution doesn't raise taxes.

Speaking at a "town hall" meeting of his supporters in Maryland on Friday, Obama disingenuously insisted that "we can't just close our deficit with spending cuts alone," avoiding tax increases, because Washington, among other things, shouldn't have to "stop funding clean energy research."

According to Obama, if we don't increase taxes on an economy suffering 9.2% unemployment, "seniors would have to pay a lot more for Medicare." (He failed to mention that Medicare is doomed without substantial reform.)

If we don't hike taxes — leaving investors with less wealth with which to generate new private-sector jobs — "laid-off workers might not be able to count on temporary assistance or training to help them get a new job," according to the president's circuitous logic.

What's going on here is pure political calculus. Republicans have done their job, offering a plan that raises the debt ceiling, sharply cuts current spending, reforms future spending authority and asks the states to ratify a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.

If that's not big — "big" being what Obama continually says he wants — what is?

The president, however, wants Republicans to co-own this dismal economy. And, at least as much, he wants Republicans to lose all credibility on their pledge not to raise taxes.

The debt battle of 2011 is all about getting Republicans to betray their spending and tax promises so that Barack Obama can be re-elected in 2012.