Barack Obama has said that raising taxes in a struggling economy is “the last thing you want to do,” but for some Democrats on Capitol Hill raising taxes is a top priority. A proposal from Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD favors raising top marginal income tax rates to nearly 50 percent.

Alarms of a double dip recession grow louder by the day. “If history is a guide, the odds that the American economy is falling into a double-dip recession have risen sharply in recent weeks and may even have reached 50 percent,” wrote New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt in Thursday’s paper. Leonhardt writes, “[J]ob growth has slowed to a pace that typically signals the start of a recession. Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one. From early 2010 through this spring, by contrast, employment was growing fast enough to make the economy look as if it were in a recovery, albeit a modest one.”