Behind the Left’s Tax Cut Freakout
26th December 2017
Pity the poor liberal Democrats. Once upon a time leading Democrats understood the need for tax reform. It’s not necessary to go back to John F. Kennedy or even the bipartisan tax reform of 1986 to see this. If you paid close attention to Hillary Clinton ten years ago when she was still in the Senate, she noted publicly that our corporate income tax system needed reform, and even Obama declared that he thought the corporate income tax rate should be lowered to around 25 percent. But he never pursued the idea, even though it would have been an easy bipartisan achievement for him. What explains this resistance?
The mystery deepens when you realize that if even eight or 10 Democratic senators had decided to support tax reform and bargain with Republicans, they might well have been able to keep the state and local tax deduction beloved of insolvent blue states everywhere, and probably the Obamacare individual mandate. One thing a handful of Democrats would easily have preserved is the prohibition on oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which has been the holy grail for environmentalists for nearly 40 years. By their intransigent opposition, Democrats were completely routed. What explains this shortsightedness, if not political incompetence?