Josh Barro counters Ezra, who thinks Obama rejected Simpson-Bowles because "the opposition party tends to recoil from proposals that are too closely associated with the White House":
The reason Obama didn’t back Simpson-Bowles is much simpler: it’s a big tax hike on the middle class. The President made a campaign promise not to raise taxes on families making $250,000 or less—98 percent of all American families. Though he has signed a couple of bills that violate that promise at the edges (raising the cigarette tax and, arguably, imposing an individual health care mandate) he has made a clear decision that it would be against his political interest to endorse any broad-based income or payroll tax increase on middle-income families. He could not endorse Simpson-Bowles because Simpson-Bowles is unpopular.
Barro doesn't provide the exact data on this, merely arguing that Simpson-Bowles keeps the progressivity of the current code while Obama now wants to increase it. That's different from a big tax hike on the middle class a year ago. I also suspect that in the context of a big bang that would dramatically resolve long-term fiscal imbalance, many middle class Americans wouldn't mind losing a deduction or two – as long as the bulk of the sacrifice is from the wealthy. My worst suspicion is that the allegedly smart guys in the Obama White House feared being tarred as weak on national security by cutting defense as much as Simpson-Bowles advised. And they wonder why Ron Paul remains popular.
Update: Ezra emails to clarify something I misread. He actually agrees with me on the core point of Obama and Simpson-Bowles:
I'm not relieved by their failure to go for Simpson-Bowles. I've argued many, many times that they should have gone for S-B, most recently arguing it the day the Supercommittee fell apart, when I thought they had an opportunity to backtrack and reverse their position. I think that on both a tactical and substantive level, the administration made a mistake here. My only point in that post is that these questions aren't as clearcut as they're sometimes made out to be. It was reasonable for the administration to choose the path they did. It's just that the path was wrong.
The Dish 