Collective Conscious

Chait and Klein expect the Democ­rats to wimp out, as usual. But wouldn’t it be some­thing if Democ­rats really held their ground, forced Repub­li­cans to fil­i­buster an attempt at a middle-​​class-​​only exten­sion, and watch the whole thing go down in flames? I know many of us would be dis­ap­pointed in the out­come, but, frankly, not overly so: the Clin­ton years were hardly unfair, and they did bal­ance the bud­get. It would solve the whole deficit prob­lem damn fast this time around too:

So, I say, why not? Obvi­ously peo­ple will cite the con­trac­tionary impact, but evi­dence shows that income tax rates just don’t change people’s behav­ior that much. Quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing has a much bet­ter chance of mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in the econ­omy at this point than stim­u­lus funds, since we can pretty much expect any stim­u­lus to be really skewed towards tax cuts (ie, the least effec­tive method).

(edit: Updated chart.)