Obama'll Fix it: Have I got some tax increases for you

As my day off ends (really a day and a half because I watched NO news on Sun­day, odd to be the least informed per­son in the house) I see that the White House is claim­ing a man­date for Tax Increases:

In char­ac­ter­is­tic fash­ion, Pres­i­dent Obama held a post-​election “press con­fer­ence” on Fri­day that didn’t involve him answer­ing any ques­tions. He just made pro­nounce­ments. And while there was a bit of con­cil­ia­tory lan­guage sprin­kled in, he was adamant that his nar­row re-​election vic­tory means every­one must now sub­mit to his the­o­ries about a “bal­anced approach” to deficit reduction.

Now I find this entire “man­date” argu­ment a tad odd. For­get­ting that we have a pres­i­dent win­ning by a smaller mar­gin in re-​election (not seen since the 3^rd term of FDR) we have the same pres­i­dent, the same sen­ate within a seat or two and the same con­trol of the house (and not just by a seat or two either).

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me the Amer­i­can Peo­ple have spo­ken and they said, “we’ll stand pat.”

But in the grand tra­di­tion of optics over action (Yeah Sandy is still Kat­rina on the Hud­son but it’s dropped off the National Radar now that the elec­tion is won) there is a school of thought that sug­gests we should con­sider some tax increases.

For a for a long time Glenn Reynolds has pointed to a par­tic­u­lar direc­tion:

The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two. Deficits are high again, and there’s already his­tor­i­cal prece­dent. Of course, to keep up with tech­nol­ogy, the tax should now apply to DVDs, down­load­able movies, pay-​per-​view and the like. But in these finan­cially per­ilous times, why should movie stars and stu­dio moguls, with their yachts, swim­ming pools and pri­vate jets, not at least shoul­der the bur­den they car­ried back in Harry Truman’s day — when, to be hon­est, movies were bet­ter anyway.

For extra fun, they could show pic­tures of David Geffen’s yacht and John Travolta’s per­sonal Boe­ing 707 on the Sen­ate floor. You want to tax fat cats? I gotcher “fat cats” right here! Repeal the Hol­ly­wood Tax Cuts!

Bill Jacob­son has a sug­ges­tion for our lib­eral friends in Col­lege:

Revoke the tax deduc­tion for con­tri­bu­tions and their tax exempt sta­tus, make them pay local real estate taxes like the rest of us, maybe that will shut them up from demand­ing that taxes be raised on every­one else.

A reader has this sug­ges­tion:

A one time excise tax on the fair mar­ket value of the endow­ments of all the pri­vate foun­da­tions would work nicely. An to be fair, the rate should be low for the small guys and 90% for the behe­moths like Ford and Carnegie.

and Human events has more sug­ges­tions:

Cap­ping the mort­gage inter­est deduc­tion at $250,000, for exam­ple, would hurt those rich blue enclaves with high prop­erty val­ues – 8 of the 10 rich­est coun­ties in Amer­ica voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Tax­ing trust funds and hoards of foun­da­tion money would hurt the Left, as out­side of Hol­ly­wood, rich lib­er­als are more likely to be sit­ting on piles of inher­ited assets, while con­ser­v­a­tive mil­lion­aires tend to be actively gen­er­at­ing and re-​investing income. End­ing the fed­eral tax deduc­tions for state and local taxes – an idea promi­nently advo­cated by Newt Gin­grich dur­ing the Repub­li­can pri­mary – would end the prac­tice of fed­eral tax­pay­ers sub­si­diz­ing the gov­ern­ment greed of those big-​spending blue states. It’s actu­ally a form of inter-​state redis­tri­b­u­tion as it stands, so let’s do away with it.

I’m sure tax & money peo­ple can some up with more but the trick isn’t think­ing them up, the trick is turn­ing them into a bill and get­ting the word out before the left can counter.

These pro­pos­als should go straight to the Amer­i­can pub­lic with these pro­pos­als before going to the White House and let the Democ­rats explain to the peo­ple who they’ve told for years why we can’t raise taxes of these folks.

The Democ­rats have been telling us for years that if we only give a bit on tax increases “Obama’ll fix it”.

Let them prove it.