Ezra Klein: To govern responsibly, the White House will need to negotiate like Republicans

08/03/2011
To govern responsibly, the White House will need to negotiate like Republicans
By Ezra Klein

There are now two sides in the American tax debate: the Republican Party, which refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes, and the Democratic Party, which ... refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes.

To govern responsibly, Democrats cannot simply raise taxes on the rich and call it a day. That’s a world in which Republicans continuously force crises, refuse taxes, and extract deeper and deeper cuts. Already, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has called the GOP’s debt-ceiling brinksmanship “a new template” and promised that “in the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore.”

But Democrats have another option. Just as Republicans planted a trigger for 2011 that ensures spending cuts, Democrats should use the Bush tax cuts as a trigger in 2012 to force revenue. Which is not to say they should campaign for raising taxes. They should campaign against an outdated, inefficient, unfair tax code as well as the Washington way of leaving hard problems for somebody else to handle.

The White House should announce that it won’t extend any of the Bush tax cuts and will instead insist on a Gang-of-Six-esque plan that cleans the code, lowers rates for everyone, and raises $2 trillion or more in revenue. If the GOP refuses, the tax cuts will expire, our revenue problems will be solved, and Republicans will suddenly find themselves much more interested in tax reform. Sometimes, to govern like a Democrat — or even just to govern responsibly — you need to negotiate like a Republican.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/to-govern-responsibly-the-white-house-will-need-to-negotiate-like-republicans/2011/07/11/gIQAljjorI_blog.html