Obama knows what he's doing! Watch what Fineman says

[Benton D Struckcheon]

8. Both of them are correct

Give Obama some credit for brains.
The Republicans wound up arguing with themselves, sometimes literally, on this.
On this site and in the real world there was an explosion of opposition.
It's what you do going into a negotiation: see I've got all kinds of people coming down on me like a hammer on this. So you guys need to give something up.
Meantime, over here, your job is to keep applying pressure so this never goes through.

Now, remember when Obama cut the payroll tax? The Republicans had to grudgingly go along, because after all it was a tax cut, right?
What it did was to introduce - and remember he actually got this passed - the idea that the payroll tax isn't sacrosanct. As I have posted elsewhere, Hyman Minsky, a Keynesian economist, once proposed eliminating it and making the income tax code more progressive to make up for it.
Someone - possibly Obama himself - in that administration read Minsky. The idea is now out there, and not just that: the actual deed has been done. 5 or 10 or even 20 years from now, you may begin to see this flat and even regressive tax eliminated in favor of getting the revenues from the progressive income tax. Count on it.
Obama started the ball rolling on that one.