In a new interview with Newsmax, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who's supposed to be the key player in "bipartisan" health care talks, called Democratic proposals to pay for health insurance reform by taxing the richest one percent of Americans "idiotic":
[Democrats have] got the feeling you can raise taxes on the top one percent and solve all the problems of government. That's not real. You could confiscate, let alone tax, all the income over $250,000 that people make each year, and you couldn't run the federal government for more than three or four months. So it's idiotic to think that's a solution...
But Grassley is setting up a straw man -- and a ridiculous one at that. Nobody is talking about solving "all the problems of government," nobody wants to "confiscate" all income over $250,000, and nobody suggested that doing so would raise enough money to "run the federal government."
What some House Democrats are proposing is a surtax on the super-rich, who in recent years have seen their income skyrocket while middle-class wages remained somewhat flat. As noted by Pat Garofalo, "Between 1979 and 2006, the inflation-adjusted after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of households increased by 256 percent, compared to 21 percent for families in the middle income quintile."
Nonetheless, Bush's tax cuts gave the top one percent of earners over $700 billion in tax breaks over ten years, which didn't exactly stimulate the economy for everyone else. The proposed surtax, which would have no effect on 98.8 percent of Americans, would require them give a portion of that unearned money back, while raising significant revenues for health insurance reform.
At any rate, Grassley's claim that such a plan is "idiotic" is in line with his other recent failures in bipartisanship. Earlier this week, Grassley used Sen. Ted Kennedy's brain tumor to fear monger about a public health insurance option.