Obama opens the door on tax increases for the middle class?

If your goal is to erase our nation’s budget deficit while maintaining and expanding the social safety net, it’s pretty well-accepted that taxes will have to be raised on the middle class.  The Obama administration also has a habit of talking a hard game but playing a soft one, e.g. Guantanamo, Wall Street, or healthcare.  One of Obama’s lines in the sand has been raising taxes on the middle class, a worthwhile campaign pledge but a pretty unworkable governing position.  Obama is smart and his advisors are smart, so they clearly realize the huge limitation this puts on their agenda, and they know they need to rhetorically pave the way for that possibility.  And in a recent interview from the Oval Office, they may have just done that.

President Obama is quoted in BusinessWeek saying that no options are off the table when it comes to reforming the budget.  “The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table.  So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions,” he explains.  Obama realizes we face a structural problem, part of which is a poorly designed tax code.  The tough part is figuring out how to change it without getting killed at the ballot box.  For those who follow the politics, being agnostic about solutions is a pretty clear way of saying open for higher taxes on the middle class.  ”Agnostic” is code for “I understand it needs to be done,” just as “originalist” is code for “I want to interpret the Constitution in a Republican way”.  It’s going to be hard to make Americans realize that fact, but it’s a fact that needs to be realized.