Howard Dean: “The truth is, everybody needs to pay more taxes, not just the rich.”

Howard Dean: “The truth is, everybody needs to pay more taxes, not just the rich.”
By: John Hayward
12/6/2012 09:14 AM

Courtesy of RealClearPolitics, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean delivers a bracing blast of leftist honesty on MSNBC: “The only problem is… and this is initially going to seem like heresy from a progressive is… the truth is everybody needs to pay more taxes, not just the rich. And it’s a good start. But we’re not going to get out of this deficit problem unless we raise taxes across the board, to go back to what Bill Clinton had and his taxes. And if we don’t do that, the problem is the pressure is going to be on spending even more.”

This isn’t really new from Dean, who is openly eager to take America off that “fiscal cliff.” Just last week, he said, “I make the argument that going off the – as you call it the curb, I call it the slope, the press calls it the cliff, is actually the best deal progressive Democrats are going to get. And here’s why. One, we get the Clinton tax rates on everybody. Will it cause a problem? Yes. There will be a short recession, and it will be painful. But two, we get defense cuts. Republicans are never going to agree to that. And three, there are some human services cuts, which we’re not going to like. But it’s the least possible damage.”

Say what you will about Howard Dean, but give him credit for far more honesty than the Chicago huckster in the White House. Dean’s always been fairly up-front about stuff like this, in a Walter Mondale sort of way. That’s why Democrat primary voters concluded, after a long Internet flirtation, that his presidental prospects would be roughly comparable to Mondale’s. He’s a nut, no doubt about it – he thinks going over the fiscal cliff would bring “a serious down payment on the deficit,” which is howlingly funny to anyone capable of third-grade math – but he’s absolutely right about the need to raise middle class taxes.

Barack Obama and the Democrats are coming for you, middle class. Make no mistake about it. They’re telling you a lot of convenient fairy tales now, for political gain. Maybe Obama will even try to stage a heroic “rescue” via “middle class tax cut” after we go over the “fiscal cliff,” at which point Howard Dean will be a good little soldier and put his liberal honesty in neutral for a while, at least until after the 2014 elections.

But the hard, cold truth is that Evil Rich People do not collectively have nearly enough money to pay for Obama-sized government. You can’t meaningfully “reduce the deficit” by confiscating their money, never mind taxing them a few percentage points more. And anything close to confiscation will utterly crash the American economy.

When the Democrats come for you, coddled taxpayers of the “middle class,” it will be with tears in their eyes. Sorrowfully they will inform you that the titanic pressure from years of their irresponsible deficit spending leaves them with no choice to but to “ask” you to “pay a little more.”

They’ll try re-defining the middle class first, the same way they made a concerted effort to re-define “millionaires” as people making $250,000 per year. (That didn’t really start with Obama, by the way. I can recall Al Gore saying something to the same effect in the late Nineties. He explained it by saying that if you make $250,000 per year for four years, well, you’ve got a million dollars gross, so you’re a millionaire.) And did you notice how smoothly the hated top One Percent became the Two Percent, in just a matter of weeks? Soon the lower boundary of sinister, unfair wealth will drop, and people who make $100k to $200k will suddenly find themselves classified as “millionaires.” Then the Left will start pointing out that people who make $80k to $100k really don’t have much in common with the Sainted Middle Class, and they will also be excommunicated.

But not even that will do it. Money must be drained from everyone who pays taxes, particularly since “progressives” have been eager to create a large underclass that receives government benefits without paying any income taxes at all. Those people pay other taxes, of course, and such “invisible” taxes will be raised too, but it won’t be nearly enough – especially since raising pass-through taxes will cut into the consumer confidence that allows Barack Obama to pretend he’s presiding over some kind of weak “recovery” instead of an endless recession with brief intermissions. Trillion-dollar deficits mean America has a government it really can’t afford; floating that debt for a few years allows the Left to weaponize its own irresponsibility, presenting America with a stack of past-due bills instead of budget proposals.

And it all begins with our willingness to divide ourselves for the benefit of the ruling class. Those tax hikes on the Evil Rich are also your signature of consent for your own tax hikes. Your willingness to “ask” others to “pay their fair share” will be cited when the same “request” is made of you. And the ruling class is reassured by the pure, nationwide stupidity of people seriously believing that a $1.6 trillion tax increase represents some sort of meaningful “solution” or “down payment” on the government fiscal crisis, rather than a lovely new pot of money that will be emptied immediately through new spending. People willing to abandon civics, common sense, and historical memory to such a degree are not difficult to manipulate.

The Democrats only have to sell this garbage to you for another election cycle or two. Then they can lower the boom, presenting the alternative to huge universal tax increases as anarchy and starvation in the streets… not to mention the termination of the “free” health care your very life depends upon. One way or another, you will be forced to pay for the government you can’t afford. Or your children will. And that makes it okay, right? Kids are easy to indenture, because they can’t defend themselves at the ballot box. They can only watch old videos of Howard Dean and wonder why their parents weren’t listening to him.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.