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May 17, 2005

Wexler's Tax Hike Proposal

Rep. Robert Wexler, the Florida Democrat, received media accolades yesterday for his alleged courage in breaking with his party and offering a rescue plan for Social Security. A little background: Mr. Wexler is an accomplished sound-bite artist and veteran of TV screaming shows -- both a ubiquitous defender of Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings and no less vociferous in his attacks on candidate George Bush during the Florida election squabbles of 2000. Then he disappeared from the airwaves after his own mini-scandal, involving peculiar financial and political dealings with an airport security company that was charged in a massive stock fraud by the SEC. Just weeks ago, he made the wrong kind of news again as the House's top recipient of lobbyist-paid trips, to the tune $155,137 since 2000. His district is populated with Social Security recipients, as he frankly stated yesterday, and the nonsense of his plan is the nonsense that has always surrounded Social Security, whose tax-and-spend nature is carefully hidden behind rhetoric implying a true savings program. To reassure himself of the votes from seniors whose benefits are not in danger under any circumstances, Mr. Wexler, who typically wins with a 75% majority, pretends to solve the problem of those who will retire 20, 30 or 40 years in the future by raising taxes on these same people now, imposing a new wage tax of 6% on earnings over $90,000 a year. In short, his plan is a perfect example of what's wrong with the traditional Democratic politicking around Social Security, which always involves A) scaring seniors and B) raising taxes to spend the money on something else. In fact, the workers who would be clobbered by his tax hike are already paying into Social Security more than it needs to pay the benefits of Mr. Wexler's constituents. That extra money simply goes to extraneous pork barrel in the present. Mr. Wexler would be long gone when future generations finally had to confront the economy's inability to generate enough resources to pay off the future elderly with confiscatory taxes on the future working population. "My allegiance to seniors is greater than my allegiance to the Democratic Party," he stated with a complete absence of meaning. But Mr. Wexler did at least rehabilitate himself in the eyes of network news producers and even a few Republicans, who last night credited him with heroism for defecting from the Democrats' "nyet, nyet, nyet" strategy on Social Security.

Posted by Andrew Roth at May 17, 2005 6:08 PM | Print

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