Our View: ‘Crude fiction’

Speaking of demagoguery, isn’t it amazing how President Obama and his party have managed not only to demonize the rich but also to arrantly reverse course on the Bush tax cuts?

Time was, if you recall — as columnist Mona Charen did recently — that Democrats vilified George W. Bush’s across-the-board reductions as tax cuts solely for “the rich.” Now, they’re conveniently defending the across-the-board nature of these cuts as they seek to raise taxes on the “top 2 percent.”

Are we such a doltish people that we can’t recognize the sheer audacity of this demagoguery? Then again, cowed Republican pols have not exactly made a definitive case for the efficacy of tax reduction. Shame on them, too.

Some conservatives, though, are waging the good fight — economist Steve Moore, for example, who, in his efforts to counter Mr. Obama’s contention that “the rich” do not come close to paying their “fair share,” has pointed out that the top 5 percent of American taxpayers fork over 61 percent of all income taxes despite amassing but 37 percent of all national income.

We contend that the likes of Mr. Moore need company: conservatives unafraid to underscore lessons of history — e.g., that tax cuts boost the economy and swell the nation’s coffers rather than cause recessions, as Mr. Obama avers — while challenging the class-warfare nostrums of statists.

Miss Charen has clearly answered this call-to-arms, as demonstrated by the conclusion to that recent column: “The problem (Mr. Obama) conjured — the rich getting richer at the expense of everyone else — was a crude fiction. It’s the kind of class-warfare appeal that has worked all over the globe. We used to be an exception. No more.”