Really, if you have been paying any attention at all to the deficit discussions over the past 6 months or so, you will know that the only people who are against increasing tax revenues — whether that is from increased taxes on the wealthy or closing of unneeded loopholes) — are Congressional Republicans. There has been a decent amount of polling about this over the past 6 months, polling that Bruce Bartlett has rounded up at his blog.
A June 9 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 61 percent of people believe higher taxes will be necessary to reduce the deficit.
A June 7 Pew poll found strong support for tax increases to reduce the deficit; 67 percent of people favor raising the wage cap for Social Security taxes, 66 percent raising income tax rates on those making more than $250,000, and 62 percent favor limiting tax deductions for large corporations. A plurality of people would also limit the mortgage interest deduction.
A May 26 Lake Research poll of Colorado voters found that they support higher taxes on the rich to shore-up Social Security’s finances by a 44 percent to 25 percent margin.
A May 13 Bloomberg poll found that only one third of people believe it is possible to substantially reduce the budget deficit without higher taxes; two thirds do not.
The thing that most (in debt) Americans know if that just reducing your expenditures AND reducing your revenues isn’t exactly a formula for debt payoff. They seem to know that over the past decade there have been large wars that no one has asked us to help pay for. And you won’t pay for them by just cutting taxes and reducing expenditures in other places.
This hard line position of no new tax revenues demonstrates the profound unseriousness of the Congressional GOP about deficit reduction or even about the business of governing. Time after time (and poll after poll) we see Americans support for the programs that Republicans are hell bent on cutting. Yet to ask for sacrifice on behalf of working class and middle class people who benefit from these programs without asking the wealthiest among us to do their share is pretty profoundly un-American. When we all face a major crisis, we all participate in getting past that crisis. What the GOP is now working at institutionalizing is an American caste system — where there are people expected to pay for government and wealthy people who get to extract resources from government.
For all of their bluster about the American people not supporting tax increases, we can see that is quite wrong. I don’t think that Americans want to pay more in taxes (wealthy or no) but definitely understand that if the debt and deficit is a problem, then taxes have to be a part of the solution. Time for the deficit hawks in both parties to come to terms with the stupidity they’ve started here. They’ve latched on to Pete Peterson’s plan to destroy Social Security and Medicare via a narrative on debt reduction. When time after time we can see real data that shows that the current debt problem is tax cuts (the reduction of revenues) and spending on wars. Yet these are the two things that are “off the table”. Which — if you look at those polls — tells you that these hard-line conservatives are not representing *the American people* at all.