Howard, using current law as the baseline is misleading. First, neither the public nor any experts expect all tax rates to spring back to pre-2001 levels. For a baseline to be meaningful, it must first be credible. Current law is not. Second, if you use current law as the baseline, you give credit (or blame) to both Bush and Obama for the very same tax cuts, namely everything below the top two brackets. Your article reads as if the tax cuts are cumulative, but they are not. It's one tax cut: first a temporary version then a decision to make it permanent. I guarantee that taxpayers do not regard continuation of current tax rates as a tax cut. Any politician attempting to persuade the public that this continuation is actually a tax cut would be ridiculed. Obama's baseline is the correct one, no matter how enticing the phantom revenue in the current law baseline appears. Your argument reminds me of the writings of tax protesters who claim the Income Tax is invalid. They come up with all sorts of legalistic reasons, but they never confront the core issue: All that legalese will never be accepted by the decision makers. Here the voters are the decision makers, and they don't know or care that current law calls for a huge tax increase in 2011. The public's baseline is Obama's baseline: current tax rates.