after trying health care, Obama should probably try his luck with a middle-class tax increase

Maybe the stumbling/bumbling Republicans can recover by 2010-- if mostly by their opponents' self-inflicted wounds...

If the Obama health care current fiasco turns into a debacle, the drive for higher middle-class taxes-- and breaking such a key (and loud) campaign promise could be devastating.

Here, the WSJ editorialists are focusing on higher "income taxes" in the future-- although a very heavy tax on income may already have been used to passed health care "reform" (higher "payroll" taxes on income).

Few of President Obama’s 2008 campaign pledges were more definitive than his vow that anyone making less than $250,000 a year “will not see their taxes increase by a single dime” if he was elected. And he was right, very strictly speaking: It’s going to be many, many, many billions of dimes.

Asked about raising taxes on the middle class on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” White House economist Larry Summers wouldn’t repeat Mr. Obama’s pre-election promise....Meanwhile, on ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also slid around Mr. Obama’s vow...

These aren’t even nondenial denials. The Obama advisers are laying the groundwork for taxing the middle class while claiming the deficit made them do it....

A piece in the New York Times... quoted Leonard Burman, a veteran of the Clinton Treasury who now runs the [liberal] Brookings Tax Policy Center... “This idea that everything new that government provides ought to be paid for by the top 5%, that’s a basically unstable way of governing.” They’re right, but where were they during the campaign?...

Democrats have already taxed the middle class by raising cigarette taxes to pay for the children’s health-care expansion. They’re also teeing up average earners with their cap-and-tax energy bill....To finance ObamaCare, they’re also proposing another 10-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax on firms and individuals that don’t purchase health insurance. But this won’t raise enough money either. So waiting in the wings is the biggest middle-class tax increase of them all: a European-style value added tax, or VAT....