And why they really oppose them:
No! Not the capital gains tax! Anything but that!
What are the right's alternatives? Here's Rob Port at Say Anything, edited for space but 100% verbatim:
...spending cuts (good) and tax hikes (bad).
... Make the Bush tax cuts permanent, then aggressively cut spending.
Oh. Thanks for the constructive input.
In a rational world, this report wouldn't upset me as much as it's currently upsetting the vast majority of lefties -- Republicans would howl at the tax increases, Democrats and the general public would howl at the benefit cuts, we'd get a stalemate, and the resultant conventional wisdom would be that Washington once again proves it can't address serious problems, but at least Barack Obama gets an A for effort.
But we don't live in that world (though the president apparently still thinks we do) -- the right will attack Obama from the left (see the Fox headline above), the mainstream press will take that transparently phony attack seriously, and the whole report will be seen as an assault on ordinary Americans exclusively. (What's about to happen now is that right and left critics are going to talk as if that's the case; I think we're about to enter one of those periods when lefties are going to start appearing on Fox a lot, basically to echo the message in the Fox headline above. And, of course, it does appear as if ordinary citizens would bear the brunt of these changes.)
So, yeah, this is going to help Republicans pretend to be regular folks' champion, disastrously. And they'll just go on telling us we can balance the budget by defunding NPR and Planned Parenthood.
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