President Obama wants tax hikes. Speaker of the House John Boehner should give him these tax hikes, like, now!

So if Boehner and his team are going to put some tax increases on the table, perhaps by eliminating deductions more than raising rates, they should learn from past mistakes a drive a truly hard bargain.  Make the spending cuts immediate, not a load of cold porridge about $X of cuts happening over ten years, eight of which will never come.  The opening bid should be small revenue increases for big fiscal restraint, something on the scale of giving Obama his silly “Buffett Rule” millionaire surtax in exchange for a balanced budget.

And let’s hope the Speaker and the rest of the Republican negotiators are smart enough to propose revenue increases that will hurt liberals the most.  Start by taxing the ever-loving crap out of Hollywood.  I’ve suggested this before, and the esteemed Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, was on the same wavelength last August when he suggested bringing back the 20 percent excise tax on motion picture gross revenue from the 1950s.

“The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two,” Reynolds recalled.  ”Deficits are high again, and there’s already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like. But in these financially perilous times, why should movie stars and studio moguls, with their yachts, swimming pools and private jets, not at least shoulder the burden they carried back in Harry Truman’s day – when, to be honest, movies were better anyway.”

As Reynolds noted, one side effect of such proposals is that it causes far-Left Hollywood types to suddenly begin babbling about the depressing effects of high tax rates upon economic growth, as though they had been suddenly possessed by the ghost of Milton Friedman.  That’s fun even if the tax proposals end up getting defeated.  Especially now that we have YouTube to disseminate and immortalize their panicked bursts of “trickle-down economic” wisdom.

Reynolds had other suggestions for revenue proposals – many of them involving the elimination of deductions, which seems to be the spirit in Washington at the moment – that would hurt blue state political machines and liberal institutions the most. (Read More)

William Jacobson is on board, even though like myself, he resides in a blue state. (Actually, two blue states, but whose counting?)

I want you to tax the crap out of the blue states in which I live because I put country ahead of personal fortune.  Not because I want to hear my tax-loving liberal neighbors squeal like stuck pigs.  I’m better than that.

I’m not. I want to hear my liberal friends whine about the taxes increases so I can say “Told you so.” Hey, we may go broke right along with them, but at least we’ll have seen it coming.

Not that I expect Boehner to outsmart Obama.

Via Doug Ross