Republicans have been tripping over one another to slag President Obama’s tax proposal, made in his State of the Union address, to repeal the step-up in basis on inherited wealth and use the revenue it would generate to increase the child tax credit and pay for free community college. While it’s almost Pavlovian for Republicans to attack any Obama tax proposal, this one actually contains the seeds for a radical tax reform that would be much more conducive to economic growth than anything currently on Paul Ryan’s desk.
Rather than merely dismiss the president’s proposal Republicans should see it as a signal that President Obama has discovered that the tax code has regressive aspects to it, and he wants to fix precisely one of those regressive provisions and use the savings from doing so to fund a modest tax cut and a new education initiative.
