Tax pledge dodge thrall - Commentary - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

Here’s a no-brainer, brought to you by opinion columnist Donald Lambro.

The winner of the Republican presidential nomination will probably be the candidate who most embodies the core principles and beliefs of Ronald Reagan.

 No kidding!  You mean like lowering tax rates and facing up to the nation’s enemies foreign and domestic?

It turns out that the Republican presidential candidates are a bit slow at signing up for Ronald Reagan’s shining agenda.  They have, at least, agreed to make President Bush’s tax rate cuts permanent.

But the front-runners for their party’s nod — Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani — have sent mixed signals on the centerpiece of Reagan’s domestic agenda: tax-rate cuts to achieve maximum economic growth. While both have said President Bush’s across-the-board income tax cuts should be made permanent before expiring in 2010, neither has signed the pledge signed by every Republican presidential nominee since 1988 promising not to raise the tax rates.

What planet are they on?  The record of John McCain is especially troubling. 

[He] was one of only two Republican senators who voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and who voted against accelerating them in 2003. He abruptly flip-flopped last year, voting to extend some of the tax cuts, when he began actively running for president.

Here’s what he said about the tax rate cuts.

I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.

Oh really?  But the president’s tax cuts were designed to reduce the taxes of middle-class Americans by a bigger percentage than the taxes of wealthier Americans.  And the result of the president’s tax cuts is that the top 50 percent of income taxpayers pay 96 percent of all income taxes.

How much is enough, Senator McCain?

If Republicans won’t cut taxes, then who will?