Bashing Catholics won't help the Democrats

Banal and inconsequential though it largely seems, the current Republican presidential campaign is churning up some public-policy issues that are likely to prove durable and divisive.

Apparently unfazed by what he called the "shellacking" of losing 66 congressmen in 2010, Barack Obama has dusted off a re-election platform that is based on selling the 97% of people who earn less than $250,000 annually on the necessity of raising taxes on the 3% who make more than that (and already pay most of the personal income taxes in the country). Even with Warren Buffett acting as Obama's happy Judas goat, it is a gratuitously divisive gesture. And no such tax hike will have any real impact on the deficit, which rolls majestically along at over $1-trillion a year. Taxes on various forms of elective consumption, such as luxury goods, would be a great deal more productive for the government, and more equitable. The President's choice of tax battlegrounds is designed more to exalt the comparative position of government in the economy and strike an egalitarian pose, than to redress the vertiginous deficit that he has stoked.

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