Editors at National Review Online deliver a message to Republicans about federal taxes.
If this is a trial balloon, it doesn’t even deserve to achieve enough altitude to get properly shot down.
Axios cited an unnamed senior White House official as saying that the administration was considering allowing taxes to go up on higher-income earners to help offset the revenue loss of fulfilling his campaign promise of no taxes on tips. It would be tempting to dismiss this as a one-off, but Ohio’s freshman senator, Jon Husted, went on CNBC on Monday and said he would be open to allowing taxes on “the wealthiest Americans” to go up “so that we can benefit working class Americans.”
For nearly 50 years now, Republicans have been known as the party that cuts Americans’ taxes — with just one notable exception to the rule. In 1988, while running to succeed Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush vowed, “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Two years later, though, Bush caved to the Democrat-run Congress and consented to a series of increases that came to haunt his term. In 1992, Bush paid the price for this reversal. First, Bush attracted a primary challenger (Pat Buchanan). Then, he lost the White House to Bill Clinton. Since that year, Republicans have known better than to repeat Bush’s disastrous mistake.
Donald Trump has made similarly absolute statements on taxation as did George H. W. Bush. On the campaign trail last year, Trump frequently promised the audience that “you’re all getting a tax cut,” swore that “our plan will massively cut taxes,” and reminded voters that, the last time he was in office, “I gave you the best tax cut in history.” This habit continued after he had been sworn in for a second term. During his address to Congress in March, Trump repeated his call for “tax cuts for everybody,” before proposing that the law he signed in 2017 had “got me high marks on the economy.” In this, Trump was correct. As last year’s election-season polling made abundantly clear, America’s voters look back fondly on the strong economy of 2019. …
