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Obama Reinforces the Glass Ceiling

9:55 AM, Aug 14, 2008 • By JAIME SNEIDER
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The New York Sun's take on the Obama tax plan:

The Obama campaign has at long last lifted the veil of mystery that has surrounded the Democratic presidential candidate's tax increase plans. Mr. Obama's two economic advisers, Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, have an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal, and it isn't pretty. ...

[T]he most astonishing sentence in the op-ed is this one: "His plan would not raise any taxes on couples making less than $250,000 a year, nor on any single person with income under $200,000." It amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions. If those two single persons with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children.

This is a clever way of criticizing Obama's tax plan, though I wonder whether the Hillary supporters most likely to support McCain are already stay at home moms. In any case, the rhetoric is consistent with the pro-family economic agenda Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam outline in their much touted book. As they observe, a dynamic approach tax policy requires a "'life-course perspective,' with measures that would allow a mother (or father, for that matter) to provide child care full-time for several years before entering, or reentering, the workforce." In Obama's proposal, the door is permanently shut -- at least until a new president or new Congress seeks tax reform.

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