An Easy One

The politics of extending Bush’s upper-class tax cuts are indeed straightforward. If you win and just extend them for lower brackets, fine.   If you lose, you still win: you have a political issue, and the new policy status quo would be much better than extending the Bush tax cuts (and arguably better than the selective extension.)    Letting the cuts expire will be painted by the GOP as a “tax hike,” but they’ll say that no matter what.    And extending all of the tax cuts in exchange for a “deal” to let them all expire is indeed particularly senseless, not least because you’d have to be crazy to think the Republicans who will probably control some or all of the relevant branches of the government when the time comes will actually respect any “deal.”