Krugman: Is Obama relying too much on tax cuts? [View All]

[Cronopio]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

... What this says is that there’s a reasonable economic case for including a significant amount of tax cuts in the package, mainly in year one.

But the numbers being reported — 40 percent of the whole, two-year plan — sound high. And all the news reports say that the high tax-cut share is intended to assuage Republicans; what this presumably means is that this was the message the off-the-record Obamanauts were told to convey.

And that’s bad news.

Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they’ll demand 100%. Then they’ll start the thing about how you can’t cut taxes on people who don’t pay taxes (with only income taxes counting, of course) and demand that the plan focus on the affluent. Then they’ll demand cuts in corporate taxes. And Mitch McConnell is already saying that state and local governments should get loans, not aid — which would undermine that part of the plan, too. ...

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I totally agree with Krugman. It's starting to sound like the DLC influence of going easy on the change thing is starting to insinuate itself into the Obama economic plan. If so (and I really do not want to believe that Obama can be so naive about this), it is *very* bad news.