The 5% ($.75 trillion a year) Question

"One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn't required. . . If ever there was a time to stand behind the captain, this is it. . . [L]ike Churchill calling upon a coalition cabinet in the depth of the war years, it’s paramount that we see the greater danger for what it is. . .We need to remember that if [he were to lose], it wouldn't be because President Obama made too many mistakes or failed to pass a sufficiently liberal agenda. The reason would be that all of us forgot the thirty-year reign of reactionary administrations (minus the Clinton years) and the power of debased politics to keep coming back, again and again."

--Deepak Chopra

Why is President Barack Obama so darn adamant about raising taxes?

That’s the question James Pethokoukis of Reuters asks, before offering the answer himself:

realize the long game [Obama]’s playing: Big Taxes to fund Big Government. Decade after decade. See, it’s an almost universal belief among left-of-center journalists, economists, policymakers and politicians that Americans must pay higher taxes in coming years to cover the medical expenses of its aging population – not to mention all sorts of brand new social spending and green “investment.” Dramatically higher taxes. On everybody. And if we have a debt crisis, maybe those tax increases come sooner rather than later.

According to Pethokoukis, taxes since World War II have averaged of 18.5% of GDP, and the highest level of taxes ever taken was 20.9% in 1944. Yet progressives now want a sustained level of taxation 5% higher than the post-World War II average.

Pethokoukis has unearthed a chart (below) from the Center for American Progress (CAP), headed by ex-President Clinton aide John Podesta. The chart shows how to bring federal revenues and expenditures into balance at 24% of GDP. Progressives are deadly serious about raising the taxes needed to sustain our currently unsustainable level of federal spending. For now, they need any tax increase. But after winning on the tax increase issue in 2012, then-lame-duck Obama will go for the major tax increases needed to support the progressives’ gigantic government.

The progressive target for federal spending at 24% of GDP contrasts with GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” which seeks to reduce spending to 19% of GDP, the historic American level of tax collection. The 5% difference works out to $733 billion a year; a yearly difference worth 3/4ths of a trillion dollars.

As we have said, and as the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone recently wrote, “in the debt limit struggle. . . what's at stake is fundamental. . . whether we should have a larger and more expensive federal government.”