Pulping the bully approach to presidential leadership, cont.

Once again, Clive Crook combines solid fiscal sense with political obtusity.  Hammering the obvious need for tax reform and tax hikes in response to the U.S. structural deficit, he accuses Obama of a lack of political courage for not endorsing Bowles-Simpson or laying out a revenue-raising plan of his own.  But Crook's argument carries the seeds of its own refutation.

Crook acknowledges the political realities that make it impossible for Obama to get anywhere if he unilaterally proposes the tax hikes the country needs -- even if those hikes come from radically reducing targeted tax breaks while cutting marginal rates:

Writhing in the budget strait jacket

I have always worried that David Brooks had a point here, back in April '08:

He made a sweeping read-my-lips pledge never to raise taxes on anybody making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year. That will make it impossible to address entitlement reform any time in an Obama presidency. It will also make it much harder to afford the vast array of middle-class tax breaks, health-care reforms and energy policy Manhattan Projects that he promises to deliver.

Clive Crook, long an advocate for a U.S. VAT,  made a similar point in Feb. '09:

In this "new era of responsibility", as the budget document is called, it would have been better for Obama to signal that huge and desirable initiatives like universal health care will impose at least some costs on all Americans. It is literally impossible to make the rich pay for everything, and telling 95% of voters that they can have all these things at no cost is not good leadership. It has even less to do with shared responsibility.