R i g h t a r d i a: Nancy Pelosi: Make millionaires pay for health car

Monday, July 20, 2009

Nancy Pelosi: Make millionaires pay for health car

Editor's Note: Supply Side economics had a bad effect on the middle class during the Reagan administration and the middle class declined. We then had eight more years of Supply Side economics that provided substantial tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. This doubled the national debt and led to a further decline of middle class incomes.

The Democrats need to reverse 20 years of the conservative counter-revolution by taxing the wealthy at a level that balances the budget and also pays for health care. Turn about is fair play. The Democrats need to stop coddling the affluent like the GOP has been doing.

7/20/09 4:07 AM EDT

Trying to sell a historic health bill to a balky caucus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told POLITICO in an interview that she wants to soften a proposed surcharge on the wealthy so it applies only to families that make $1 million or more.

The change could help solidify the Blue Dog Democrats. Their support is key to meeting the speaker’s goal of having health care reform pass the House by the August recess.

The bill now moving through the House would raise taxes for individuals with annual adjusted gross incomes of $280,000, or families that make $350,000 or more.

“I’d like it to go higher than it is,” Pelosi said Friday.

The speaker would like the trigger raised to $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for families, “so it’s a millionaire’s tax,” she said. “When someone hears, ‘2,’ they think, ‘Oh, I could be there,’ because they don’t know the $280,000 is for one person.

Pelosi said she is open to other changes — that she is taking an “agnostic” approach to getting a bill, rather than working from a “theology” of reform. Pelosi said,"Does it lower costs, improve quality?”

Pelosi said she has felt a certain “serenity” ever since she became speaker and says she’s “ready for all of this.” Ticking off the year’s remarkable agenda, she praised the stamina of her members, chairs and leaders, calling the Democratic team a “partnership.”

Pelosi said White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who has tight relationships throughout the House, is “doing an excellent job.”

“He’s great, and I knew he would be,” she said. “The only thing is, I certainly would still like to have him here. There’s no question about that. But I’m so proud of him. I take some level of pride in his success, having appointed him to the DCCC, only in his second term, and as a member of the Ways and Means Committee.”

“It’s such a big day for us,” she said. “I don’t’ think anybody would have ever thought that would be happening on schedule, the way it is. So it’s pretty exciting. It’s historic.”

She’s arguably the second most powerful person in government, yet obliged to court fickle members, vote by vote. Some friends said the nail-biter vote for Obama’s climate-change plan was the most difficult thing she’d ever done. But she said health care would probably be “the most exciting.”

“Every single person in America is an expert on his or her health care,” she said. “The differences among members are regional, they’re generational, they’re ethnic — concerns that are really not necessarily political, partisan. We want this to work for the country. So we have to listen to everybody.