And Republicans have been united in embracing the Supreme Court's ruling that Obamacare is constitutional because the individual mandate is a tax, with one exception: Mitt Romney. His aides initially said it wasn't a tax as a way to prevent Obama from pointing out that Romneycare included a mandate, too. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board was furious over it, because, as Slate's Dave Weigel explains:

Ideally, if you're a modern Republican presidential candidate, you get to run against a candidate who raised taxes. You can promise relief from those taxes. That's why, from a WSJ perspective, Romney so badly needs to frame the Obamacare penalty as a Middle Class Tax Hike. There's no other massive tax hike to run against!

Romney has since called Obamacare a tax. But now Obama wants to move on to talking about keeping tax rates low only for those making less than $250,000. "If Congress doesn't do this, millions of Americans, including these good-looking people behind me, could see their taxes go up," Obama said Monday. In case that was too subtle in suggesting he was on the side of wholesome American everymen instead of rich people, Obama added, "This is not just my opinion. The American people are with me on this. Poll after poll shows that's the case." This is actually true. Not only to Americans favor taxing the rich, they are more likely to think they pay a fair amount in income taxes than at any time since 1949.

Aside from the polls, there's another reason it's hard for Republicans to argue that taxes need to be cut: they're already really low. In May, the National Review's Thomas Sowell suggested that Republicans revived the arguments they made in the 1920s that cutting tax rates on the rich actually brings in more money to the treasury. Those arguments "eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent," he said. But the current top tax rate is not 73 percent. It's 35 percent. And as Bruce Bartlett explained in The New York Times, "the average federal income tax rate on the 400 richest people in America was 18.11 percent in 2008, according to the Internal Revenue Service, down from 26.38 percent when these data were first calculated in 1992." Romney, as Obama's campaign doesn't want us to forget, is paying even less than that.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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