from The Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes writes The No-Growth Democratic Party

In 1997 President Bill Clinton signed the Taxpayer Relief Act, cutting the tax rate on capital gains to 20% from 28%. Senate Democrats voted 37-8 in favor of the bill. House Democrats backed it 164-41. In 2015 Mr. Clinton’s wife, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, wants to raise the current 23.4% rate on capital gains, nearly doubling it for wealthy investors.

In 1982 Sen. Bill Bradley and House member Dick Gephardt, both Democrats, unveiled an ambitious tax-reform plan that would spur economic growth by eliminating loopholes, broadening the tax base and reducing the top rate on individual income to 30% from 50%. What Mr. Bradley and Mr. Gephardt started, President Reagan and Congress finished in 1986. A bipartisan tax-reform package was enacted, with a top rate of 28%.

Now Democrats have a new definition of tax reform. “They want to broaden the base and raise tax rates,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office. Rather than promote economic growth—a goal of Mr. Bradley and Mr. Gephardt—this approach is almost certain to hamper it. After nearly seven years of sluggish growth during the Obama era, the party seems to think that even an anemic 2% annual increase in GDP is too much.

print