Rep. Pence Lies About Orszag's New York Times Column

In an interview on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show today, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) dishonestly claimed that former White House budget director Peter Orszag favors continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.  During the interview, Pence cited Orszag's column in yesterday's New York Times as evidence that Republicans are "winning this argument" about taxes (listen here). 

PENCE:  Everywhere you go, people are scratching their heads and just can't believe that this administration continues to cling to the idea of raising taxes in January.  And even Peter Orszag, the immediate past head of the president's Office of Management and Budget, wrote in the New York Times yesterday that even he now thinks we ought to preserve all the existing tax relief for at least a couple years.  So I think we're winning this argument, but don't expect the president to acknowledge that today. 

Pence is completely distorting what Orszag actually wrote.  As Orszag explained, President Obama's plan to extend the tax cuts for just the middle class is the right way to go, but the political reality of a deadlocked Congress might require also extending them for the wealthiest Americans (to prevent the scheduled tax hike on everybody):

In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it. [...]

The beauty of extending the tax cuts for only two years is that canceling them doesn't require an affirmative vote. It happens by default, so Congressional deadlock works in its favor. And it would essentially solve our medium-term deficit problem, reducing the deficit by $200 billion to $350 billion a year from 2015 to 2020.

Orszag clearly disagrees with Pence; he's simply making a political judgment about how to deal with Republican obstruction.  What's more, despite Pence's bluster, a large majority of Americans believe that the rich should pay higher taxes regardless of the slow recovery.