Help me rebut an article from a conservative friend

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Note: My replies are italicised; the original text is not. I would like to provide plenty of links to original sources to support my rebuttal. My friend doesn't trust NY Times or other "obvious" liberal-slanted sources, so whenever you can find a link that comes from a "conservative" source, that would be helpful. Text in bold is a plea for a further rebuttal, or a good link to back up an assertion. Ideally, I'd like every assertion I make to be supported by another source. I just don't have time to do it properly...

The Shrinking Democrats
Voters don't trust the party on taxes and security.

Friday, August 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

Karl Rove often gets credit for being smart, but it doesn't hurt that President Bush's chief political strategist is lucky. His latest good fortune is the battle between Howard Dean and John Kerry over how much to raise taxes. The scrap is a microcosm of the current Democratic problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/29FT-DEFICITS.html

A recent report commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill warns that the U.S. is facing a deficit of up to $44 trillion in the next several years. The report estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 per cent across-the-board income tax increase.

The country is headed toward a financial abyss, and only heavy spending cuts, massive tax increases, or both, will stave off economic disaster. The Republicans like to bill themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, but if you look at every Republican administration since Carter, you'll see they're the party of tax cuts and ballooning deficits. (I really need a good link here, with statistics.)

Consistent with his punch-in-the-gut campaign style, Mr. Dean wants the full monty. In the name of his Vermont "fiscal conservatism," the Democrats' new Presidential front-runner proposes to repeal all three of the Bush tax cuts, right down to the last penny for every taxpayer. In addition, as he recently told NBC's Tim Russert, he'd raise the income threshold on the payroll tax, another huge tax increase on anyone making more than $87,000 a year.

Expanding the payroll tax, or reducing Social Security benefits, is necessary to keep the system afloat.

Mr. Kerry, who has lost his New Hampshire lead to Mr. Dean, says this is going too far. "Real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class," he charges, explaining that he'd preserve the Bush tax credits for children and marriage penalty relief. But he'd still repeal the rest of the Bush tax cuts, including the rate cuts on income, dividends and capital gains. (Apparently the Massachusetts Senator thinks no one in the middle class owns stock.) Mr. Dean fired back that this is a sign that Mr. Kerry lacks the courage of Democratic "principles."

It is certainly tempting (and perhaps politically expedient) to offer to maintain the cuts for middle class and below, but I think Dean is being more realistic: if we want to avoid serious problems, we need to raise more taxes. I think Dean took O'Neill's report to heart. Regarding middle-class stock ownership, I believe most in the middle class hold most of their portfolio in tax-deferred accounts (401(k)s, IRAs, etc.), so would largely be immune to taxes on dividends.

Mr. Rove must be wondering what he did to deserve this. In pursuit of Mr. Dean, every Democratic Presidential candidate is now proposing some kind of tax increase, from the humongous (in Mr. Dean's case, $2 trillion over 10 years) to merely the huge. Not being masochists, they must believe this will help them retake the White House. But we'd suggest they all study Mark Penn's latest analysis on the Democrats' shrinking political appeal.

Suggesting we can maintain the tax cuts is ludicrous. I only hope the American electorate realises this before it's too late.

Mr. Penn is the pollster most famous for fashioning Bill Clinton's New Democratic political themes. This week he released a survey, sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council, that has ominous news for his party going into an election year. Though he found that Mr. Bush is vulnerable, "the Democratic Party is currently in its weakest position since the dawn of the New Deal." The share of voters who identify themselves as Democrats is down to 33%, lower even than in the GOP landslide year of 1994 and down from 45% as recently as 1968.

Whatever happened to the ballyhooed "emerging Democratic majority?" Mr. Penn finds that it is vanishing along with support for Democrats in the suburbs and among white men and women raising children. "Today only 22% of white men identify themselves as Democrats," he writes, compared with 37% for Republicans.

It doesn't matter how people identify themselves; what matters is how they will vote. People who typically vote Republican are very likely to identify themselves as Republicans. In contrast, many who usually vote Democratic cast themselves as Independents. (I could use a good statistical link to back this up, too.)

Among white men age 25 to 49, only 41.5% even have a favorable view of Democrats. More than 70% of that group view the GOP favorably. As for income groups, the nearby table shows how the heart of the tax-paying middle class is abandoning the Democrats.

There was no table in the article supporting this. Assuming these stats aren't outright fabrications, they are likely spun somehow. Can anybody credibly refute the above paragraph?

Mr. Penn attributes this mass defection to "current perceptions that Democrats stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal, and are beholden to special interest groups." They also suffer from what he calls a "security gap," or the "wide chasm" between the parties on keeping America safe after 9/11. "Today, Democrats must be strong on security to be heard on the economy," the strategist writes.

Is this Mr. Penn a member of the DLC (Democrats who Love Cheney?) I think with the military buildup, creation of Dept. of Homeland Distraction, whoops, Security, and USA PATRIOT Act, many Americans are seeing the Republicans as the builders of bigger government than ever before. And the Republicans are no less in the pockets of special-interest groups than Democrats. Need specifics here, preferably with links.

Alas, these days Mr. Penn is a prophet without followers. Democratic candidates are all chasing Mr. Dean's poll numbers in the opposite direction, competing to see who can attack Mr. Bush most aggressively on the war and for his tax cuts.

On taxes, in particular, they are listening too much to the Beltway pundit class. These sages are prodding the Democrats to stand proudly for repealing the Bush tax cuts, on grounds that they benefit mainly "the rich" and have caused the budget deficit. Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who urged Al Gore to assail business in 2000, is also promoting a Democratic tax increase.

See my above comments on the necessity of tax increases.

These are the same folks who applauded Walter Mondale back in 1984 when he claimed to be brave in proposing to repeal the Reagan tax cuts. Fritz carried Minnesota and the District of Columbia. They look fondly back on 1992, when Bill Clinton won while proposing a tax increase on "the rich." But Mr. Clinton also ran on a tax cut for the middle class, and against a George H. W. Bush who had given the issue away by raising taxes himself. This President Bush has no such credibility problem, and with the economy now beginning to accelerate he'll be able to give the tax cuts much of the credit.

There has got to be a good rebuttal to this, but i don't have time to make it.

The tax issue is only one of the many signs that the Democratic Party is veering back to the left. Mr. Dean's rise is another, but the trend also shows up in the relentless partisan opposition to the Bush agenda in Congress. Democrats seem to have concluded from their 2002 defeat that their mistake was that they weren't obstructionist enough.

Relentless opposition? The House and Senate Dems bent over and grabbed their ankles and let the Republicans push through some of their most odious legislation without a struggle. Details?

This is all great news for Republicans, though we'd argue not for the country. On the present Democratic course the GOP may have a chance to finally become a governing majority in 2004 and beyond, but sooner or later the Democrats will get their turn again. We'd much prefer a center-left party in the mold of Britain's Tony Blair, one that is tough against terror and recognizes that private markets create wealth. It isn't healthy in our democracy to have a major political party run off the rails.

The Democratic Party isn't "running off the rails". There was a period of time, between 2000-2002 in particular, when the Dems mistakenly believed mainstream America wanted them to be "Republican Lite". They're finally coming to their senses, and realising they need to give independent voters a reason to distinguish between them and the Republicans, rather than continuing as the obsequious lapdogs they were.

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1. kick