In the aftermath of a last-minute deal to raise the US debt ceiling, Barack Obama has hinted that tax rises may be back on the agenda.
The immediate crisis of the US potentially defaulting on its debt was averted with a last minute deal, but politicians on both sides of the debate are still unhappy. Much of the attention has been focused on the intransigent Tea Party faction of the Republican Party, but it would be wrong to under-estimate the anger among Democrats.
Many feel that Obama capitulated far too much ground, agreeing to huge scale cuts in public spending.
While Republicans have insisted that the deal does not include tax rises, Obama said in a short statement that the national debt could only be reduced through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises, particularly for big corporations and the very wealthy. In a return to the rhetoric he entered the debt battle using, he said:
Everyone is going to have to chip in. That is only fair. That’s the principle I’ll be fighting for during the next phase of this process.
And fight he will have to, if he wants to get tax rises through. His attempt to end the Bush-era tax cuts last year triggered outrage and – once again – he relented, agreeing to extend them until 2012. Ending these enormous tax cuts is the obvious way to reduce the deficit (you can see here how much they contributed to the country’s huge debt), but Obama may yet decide it is too risky so close to an election.
Putting tax rises back on the table in as serious way will reignite the ideological battle that brought America to the brink of default this week.
Indeed, many Republicans remain dissatisfied with the current deal, arguing that its spending cuts do not go far enough. Many Tea Party activists still oppose it, even though that their representatives successfully pushed the entire debate far to the right despite controlling less than half of one House (“I hate the deal,” said Andrew Hemingway, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire)..
Obama has already eloquently argued that those most able to pay should do their bit for deficit reduction, at the start of this battle. There is a clear ideological case to be made at the next election: that tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich should not be maintained at the cost of healthcare for pensioners. However, if his words are not matched by confident, decisive action, there is no point in reopening the debate. He has a lot of work to do if he is to shore up support among his own support-base, let alone the country at large.
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