Here Comes the Charge for Higher Taxes

On Saturday, I warned:

The new concern by the Establishment over the deficit must be viewed as a Trojan horse. The huge deficit was obviously caused by out of control government spending. Yet, the Establishment is using the result, the huge deficit, as an excuse to increase government meddling in the economy through higher taxes!

Now, comes this news (via WaPo) from the George Soros funded Center for American Progress:

...a paper to be released Tuesday by the Center for American Progress (CAP) shows how difficult it would be to stabilize the debt solely through spending cuts. If all the tax cuts were extended, Congress would have to cut $325 billion in 2015 alone to get the deficit down to Obama's target of 3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. If the cuts were preserved only for the household incomes less than $250,000 a year, as Obama has proposed, Congress would still have to cut $255 billion.

A one-year reduction of either size would amount to the sharpest cut in federal spending "since the military demobilization after World War II," said Michael Ettlinger, the paper's co-author and CAP's vice president for economic policy.

Ettlinger and co-author Michael Linden conclude that closing the gap would require "really painful and politically difficult" actions, such as slashing highway funding and agriculture subsidies by two-thirds and taking deep bites out of Pell college grants, the Pentagon, housing assistance - even Social Security.

Then in a cute piece of double talk, WaPo writes:

Ettlinger is not among those who call on Obama to let the Bush tax cuts expire, saying it would break the president's campaign pledge to protect the middle class. Still, he added, "we're going to have to put revenue on the table."

WTF? What does he expect the government to do to raise revenues, sell iPads? It's slickly packaged, but the campaign to raise taxes has begun.