right spot in the tax argument. and my bet here is that he s only going to get better as refining and simplifying that point. yeah, they keep pushing on what turned out to be an open door, lawrence. a few months ago, a lot of analysts, including this one, me, wondered if pushing the fairness argument on taxes was risky for president obama. but it turns out, in a time of a bleak economy, when everybody s looking for a fair shake, that this argument really works. and it s not just that rich people are going to get more, what the president is saying now is, middle class voters are going to get less. and on top of that, lawrence, he s now having secured that ground, he s now going to the deficit argument on this too, which is very shrewd of him. in a speech in akron today, it was all about this topic. he didn t talk about anything else but this. it s clearly working. and the problem that mitt romney has is, once again, he s being
you re saying about, jack, whether the political system has the capacity to do this thing. it doesn t. it doesn t appear to. but i think that s a profound statement about the political system. forget all of these arguments. i mean, just as like a test of the capability of the legislative process to raise marginal rates, which we haven t done since clinton. right, it s been since, i guess, 93 that budget. marginal rate increase in the health care law. that s true. and capital gains tax increase of 2.81%. so, this question of whether we can do this, i think, is still remains as really core question. whether the justifications are that we need to raise revenue for the government or this fairness argument, to me, it ends up being a test of how strong our democratic system is. but i think it really is the failure of the left to make the positive case for government. you basically made the case for higher taxes that even if we
they need to be on top of that. it undermines obama at the theme they heard them stress earlier. fairness argument by the rules. if you live by it, completely undermined the argument. he understands that. and what people end up with are hand-outs. bret: on this show we can promise we won t always look at the shiny thing, the political back and forth day day-to-day. we get in the policy weeds. and in virginia they were debating the merit of obamacare. check out peter doocy s report on that on the home page, foxnews.com/specialreport. next up, the friday lightning round.
debt, printing money to buy debt. instead of having it sold to other people and reduce long-term interest rates and keep those down. those are the margins, though. very much on the margin. the other thing, signal they re going to keep short-term interest rates low for a longer period of time to encourage people to borrow. more on the margins, to try to signal what the fed is doing something but there s not a lot they re going to do and certainly nothing that is going to get done that is going to change the trajectory of the economy between now and election day. margaret carlson, what do they do at the white house as the economy keeps stumbling along, hoping mitt romney makes mistakes? that s one hope. i would think. and he does make them. but they re doing the fairness argument, that, you know, the economy isn t fair to you. you re playing on unfair territory and going after the tax argument, which is, you know, it was having some effect, the bain ads were having some
they bear the name of his predecessor. president obama is seizing the bush tax cutted and calling for them to be extend, but not for everyone. the president wants to let them expire for the wealthiest americans. that puts him at odds with congressional republicans, as well as his rival mitt romney and sets the stage for a very heated battle with less than four months to go before the election. our white house correspondent brianna keilar is covering this for us. first of all, why is the president doing this today? reporter: well, wolf, this is certainly part of his narrative that he s trying to put out there as he runs for re-election. this is very much happening through that political prism. he tried to portray himself as really the one fighting for the middle class. now he s trying to portray his opponent mitt romney and congressional republicans as being defenders of the wealthy. so what he s calling for is for an extension of the bush-era tax cuts only for american fami