Yesterday, I complained about the misleading GOP talking point that the Democratic budget proposes “the largest tax increase in American history,” as Rep. Paul Ryan put it.

As I pointed out, President Bush and the Republicans wrote the expiration of the tax cuts into law. They created the “largest tax increase in American history,” not Democrats. Refusing to bail the GOP out of a fiscal hole does not mean that Democrats are the ones raising taxes.

However, the talking point is everywhere. Today, President Bush became the latest Republican to repeat it by using the line in his radio address:

Democrats in the House and the Senate also recently passed their annual budget resolutions. Their budgets would raise your taxes and raise government spending in Washington…

Overall, the Democrats would raise taxes by a total of nearly $400 billion over the next five years. To put this in perspective, this would be the largest tax increase in our Nation’s history, even larger than the tax increase the Democrats passed the last time they controlled Congress.

There should be no doubt that this is a coordinated strategy. Back on March 16, Senator Chuck Grassley was already pushing it in response to committee passage of the Senate Democrats’ budget.

Three days later, a “key GOP aide” told Paul Bedard of US News & World Report that “Republicans will be in sync on the budget issue by calling it the largest tax increase in American history.”

Since then, we’ve heard the line from a string of top Republicans and their media apparatchiks, including House Minority Leader John Boehner in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (subscription required; via
Sam Rosenfeld), Robert Novak in his Washington Post column (via
mcq at Q&O), White House budget director Rob Portman in a statement (PDF), House Republican Whip Roy Blunt in a press release, Senator Chuck Kyl in a Washington Times op-ed, and Senator/presidential candidate Sam Brownback in an article in The Hill.

What’s especially annoying is that the media seems like it’s going to pass on the talking point without explaining why it’s misleading. Consider how it was treated in the current Associated Press article on Bush’s radio address:

The House plan promises a big surplus in five years by allowing tax cuts passed in the president’s first term to expire. It awards spending increases next year to both the Pentagon and domestic programs, but it defers difficult decisions about unsustainable growth in federal benefit programs such as Medicare.

The Senate blueprint is similar but would not generate surpluses since it assumes lawmakers will renew the most popular of the tax cuts due to expire at the end of 2010.

Bush equates letting the cuts expire to a tax increase. He said Saturday the blow would amount to nearly $400 billion over five years _ what he said would be “the largest tax increase in our nation’s history.”

“Whether you have a family, work for a living, own a business or are simply struggling to get by on a low income, the Democrats want to raise your taxes,” the president said. “With their budgets, the Democrats have revealed their true intentions.”

This is going to become a terrible semantic debate in which Republicans browbeat the media into not reporting that they created the expiration. And what’s so frustrating is that it’s easy to explain. The GOP wrote the law making the tax cuts expire. They want to make them permanent. The Democratic budget does not do so (at least not without offsetting revenue). Was that hard?