by Patrick Appel
Yglesias cries foul:
If they gave out awards for dumb new policy ideas, President Obama and Republican rising star Sen. Marco Rubio would both be medaling this week. Their achievements? Rubio’s completely pointless bill offering a tax break to recipients of Olympic medals and—even worse—the president’s decision to hop on the bandwagon rather than show the country he has a firmer grasp on the issues than his adversaries do. In the scheme of things, of course, winning Olympic prizes is not an important sector of economic activity, and the medals’ tax status doesn’t really matter. But the overall shape of the tax code does matter a great deal, and the speed with which a bipartisan consensus emerged around making it worse bodes quite poorly for efforts to make it better.
He follows up at his blog:
Obviously the specific revenue implications of this bill are small. But the framing around it is deeply right-wing. The idea is that taxes are a kind of penalty, and that we shouldn't be penalizing these worthy athletes for their efforts. But by that token we shouldn't be penalizing the people who invented Gmail or founded Papa John's or earn a living driving a long-haul truck or making beds at the motel or designing marketing materials for Sabre printers. The typical way to make money is to do some work that some other people find valuable enough to pay you for.
Josh Barro is unsurprised:
Obama’s acquiescence isn’t surprising when you look at his broader take on tax policy. The president likes to talk about raising taxes on the wealthy so that they pay their “fair share.” But he irresponsibly promises that he won’t raise taxes on families making under $250,000 a year — 98 percent of the population — in spite of an $11 trillion budget gap over ten years. The president’s whole tax policy agenda is built around moral desert, not revenue sufficiency.
The Dish 