Paging Mr. Mondale
Over the past year, Democrat John Edwards has shuffled farther and farther left to keep his presidential campaign in the news. Now the former senator and vice presidential nominee hopes to win more converts among the uber-liberal by channeling Walter Mondale.
Mr. Mondale, you’ll recall, sealed one of the biggest routs in presidential election history by using his 1984 Democratic nomination acceptance speech to promise massive tax increases. “Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done,” Mr. Mondale said.
Mr. Edwards echoed a similar sentiment Sunday in San Diego. On top of repealing tax cuts signed into law by President Bush, a move that would constitute the largest tax increase in American history, Mr. Edwards wants to hike levies to even higher levels. He told the California Democratic Convention that he would consider raising taxes on upper-income earners and corporations, as well as instituting taxes on “excess profits.”
“It’s just the truth,” Mr. Edwards said at a news conference after the speech. “It’s the only way to fund the things that need to be done.” Among those “things” is a universal health care proposal that Mr. Edwards says would cost between $90 billion and $120 billion per year.
Mr. Edwards has gained much political traction with his “two Americas” class-warfare stump speech, which holds that a small percentage of wealthy Americans are enjoying higher and higher standards of living while the majority of citizens “fall behind.”
Never mind the fact that the wealthiest 10 percent of American households already pay 71 percent of all income taxes and the bottom 60 percent of earners carry less than 1 percent of the burden.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the only Democrat in the presidential race who advocates tax restraint, recognizes the risks of making a tiny share of the population pay the bills for everyone else. “How many times are we going to use that (tax increases on the rich) to pay for stuff?” Gov. Richardson asked during a Monday meeting with the Review-Journal’s editorial board.
Mr. Edwards and other Democrats angling to win January’s Nevada presidential caucus — and the White House in 2008 — should temper their enthusiasm for new spending by remembering where that got Mr. Mondale.