I'll start by saying that I believe everything Goolsbee says here is true.

I think the problem is that the framing of the issue is too narrow.

Let's start with his list of Republican priorities vs. Obama's priorities. He uses the antiseptic euphemisms about "Top 2%" and "Bottom 98%", when the words he needs to be using are "the super-rich" and "everyone else".

He also should be mentioning that if we're going to go further into debt right now to help the economy, the best thing we could do to help it is to increase government spending, but because Republicans don't care about anything but making sure the rich don't have any obligations to anyone but themselves, they won't even talk to us about that.

It's true that all the tax cuts he put on the Obama side of the chart are tax cuts the left would like, the problem is that to replace the lost revenue, we should be raising taxes on the rich, so revenues overall go up, or at least stay the same.

The reason being, the Republicans understand that this is a long game. They want to see revenues go down, no matter what. If deficits keep going out of control, they think this benefits them, because then they have an excuse to cut back on the programs that help poor people that used to be paid for with money collected from rich people, because Democrats are too chickenshit (or bought) to actually raise taxes on the rich.

Letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, even the ones for the poor and middle classes, is a win for us. It might be unpopular, but that's why you make it clear that it's the Republicans who let it happen by refusing to see reason. It should be easy, they act unreasonable all the damn time.

Of course, I don't really want them all to go away, I want Obama's original tax plan to go through. But I'd rather see them all go up than let the cuts for the top 2% get extended another day, because otherwise we've screwed ourselves in the long game. If they pass, and the economy recovers, the overtly right-wing mainstream media will credit the Bush tax cuts that Obama was forced to extend by heroic Republicans who only had 42 seats in the Senate at the time.

If it doesn't, the overtly right-wing mainstream media will blame the deficits that Obama created with "wasteful government spending" -- even though all of the waste was the tax cuts!

He needs to start framing his policies and political messaging with the long game in mind, instead of these shortsighted half-measures that might do a little short-term good. Nobody believes that these left-wing tax cuts Goolsbee is highlighting will fix the economy, and no one thinks that in 2020 we'll look back on that part of the tax cut package and think of it as the thing that saved the economy. All this package does is cede the overall argument to the other side (namely that only tax cuts for the rich help the economy), and advance their long-term strategies to destroy the country by "starving the beast".

not gonna watch this vid, coz i'd have to downvote it. Plan is just like our "health care package". Obama lets lobbyists write a bill and then goes into the dressing room to prepare for Kabuki theatre.

Upvote for discussion.

Moving this video to NetRunner's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.