QOTD: Podhoretz on Trollbama

At tomorrow night’s State Of The Union addresss, the President will unveil his new plan to raise taxes on high income earners, high net worth investors and financial institutions with over $50 billion in assets. The general idea will be to hike the taxes on capital gains up to 28% for households earning over $500,000 per year (they’ve already been hiked from 15% to 23% by this administration) and to eliminate the trust loophole on large estates. The new revenues would be used to support the middle class with an additional child tax credit and to make community college free for people who cannot afford it.

Of course, most of this is never going to happen now that the GOP controls congress and Obama’s presided over a historic cleansing of Democratic politicians at the state level.

So is the whole thing just trolling – a proposal meant to generate massive outrage from the right? Podhoretz thinks so, but I doubt it. Rather, I’d guess that this is about one more attempt to even the scales after six years of huge and widening inequality between the upper ten percent of American income earners and everyone else. It was the basic idea that Obama’s first campaign was based on and, years later, it remains his biggest abject failure. It’s quite ironic that President Obama’s two terms have seen the biggest gap in economic equality in almost a hundred years. I don’t think he wants to leave without one last fight for the cause.