"Shared Sacrifice" Malarkey

From Jonah Goldberg, writing for National Review Online:

As for shared sacrifice, it is hard to find any in his [Obama's] proposal. Six out of ten U.S. households receive more from the government than they pay in taxes. If “shared sacrifice” is the standing order of the day, where is theirs? The president suggests that repealing Bush’s tax cuts will save the day. But the vast bulk of those cuts go to people making less than $250,000 a year. The president wants to keep those cuts as his idea while talking about shared sacrifice. Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal notes, if you taxed everyone who makes over $100,000 at a rate of 100 percent, you still wouldn’t raise enough to balance president Obama’s budget, never mind pay off any debt.

The only good news to come from all of this is that the battle is now joined. The president has staked his banner in the soil of reactionary liberalism. Good. By setting his fortifications so far to the left of the middle ground, he gives the forces of reform room to advance far.