It wasn't that long ago that America solved a debt crisis by (gasp) ... raising taxes on the rich
If there's one aspect of the deficit reduction plan that President Obama outlined last week that congressional Republicans most object to, it's probably his call for higher income tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Specifically, Obama wants to let the Bush-era rates for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans expire at the end of 2012.
With a few notable (and, within their party, increasingly marginalized) exceptions, Republicans have vehemently attacked this suggestion. According to the GOP's line, to raise taxes on anyone now, even (or especially) the wealthy, would kill the recovery and cost jobs, depriving the Treasury of revenue and only making the deficit problem worse.
"We don't have deficits because Americans are taxed too little, we have deficits because Washington spends too much," is House Speaker John Boehner's standard line on the issue -- a refrain that is echoed by virtually every other Republican on the national stage. If this anti-tax adamance -- and the dire warnings of what life in a post-tax hike America would look like -- sounds familiar, it's for good reason.
Republicans issued the exact same warnings the last time a president proposed addressing exploding deficits (in part) through tax increases on the wealthy. This was back in 1993, when Bill Clinton came to office after a campaign in which the national debt -- which had then just crossed the $4 trillion mark -- played an unusually prominent role.
The '92 White House race had taken place against the backdrop of high unemployment and widespread economic anxiety and pessimism.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/19/republicans_deficit_taxes/index.html
