At the tail end of an interesting post on public preferences regarding tax policy, Ezra Klein cites blogger Bruce Bartlett:

I’m reminded of Bruce Bartlett’s point that conservatives will eventually embrace a value-added tax because the only other option will be a heavy raft of taxes on their wealthiest donors.

Just yesterday, Ezra wrote a thoughtful post explaining that he is a policy partisan, and not a Democratic partisan. I wonder if it is worth mentioning that congressional Democrats, despite outsized majorities, haven’t gone very far in the direction of advancing tax policies that align with the preferences of voters regarding upper-income tax increases. One hypothesis is that Democratic House members who represent affluent constituents, and who also rely on contributions from the wealthy to finance their campaigns, are resistant to tax increases. Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal elaborated on this theme last spring.

Two freshmen representatives — Dina Titus, from suburban Las Vegas, and Colorado’s Jared Polis, representing Boulder, Vail and some of the tonier suburbs of Denver — joined Republicans to vote against Mr. Obama’s top-priority health-care overhaul when it faced a vote in their House Education and Labor Committee. One reason was a one-percentage point-surtax on couples earning between $350,000 and $500,000 — gradually increasing to 5.4 percentage points on earnings more than $1 million — to pay for it.

The article continues in this vein:

Election gains in some of these affluent regions have helped give Democrats big majorities in the House and Senate. Of the 25 richest districts, 14 are represented by Democrats, according to Congressional Quarterly. In 1995, Democrats represented just five of those districts.

As for public preferences, it’s worth noting that while the public has long favored increasing taxes on high earners, things often change when actual legislative language is on the table. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has, to his credit, recognized that the spending levels contemplated by the Administration imply that extending middle class tax cuts is not a very prudent course of action. And as Weisman observes:

The president wants to allow George W. Bush’s income-tax cuts to expire in 2011 for families earning at least $250,000 and to stop the estate tax from being repealed next year. Mr. Obama also campaigned on putting an additional payroll tax of two to four percentage points on incomes above $250,000 to help put Social Security back on solid footing. As the president confronts a surging budget deficit and presses his ambitious agenda, all those tax increases may be necessary to make ends meet.
All together, Democratic plans could push the top tax rate to 47%, the highest level since the tax code was rewritten in 1986.

As political junkies will recall, the president won a 52 percent majority of voters in households earning $200,000 or more in 2008. It’s safe to assume that many of them live in high-cost metropolitan areas, and are in two-earner households with children. Many of them would doubtless favor a surtax on those earning $1 million or more. But unfortunately, such a surtax wouldn’t raise very much revenue relative to a broader levy on upper-middle-class households. That is why, despite the political obstacles, this constituency will face higher taxes under PPACA, as my Economics 21 colleagues observed earlier this month:

Desperate for revenue to fund the enormous cost of the health care bill, the Administration and Congress agreed to apply a new Medicare payroll tax – once again, on small business owners and families with incomes over $250,000 (individuals over $200,000). The provision would increase the Medicare payroll tax on wages for these people from 2.9% to 3.8%. Furthermore, it would expand the income to which this tax applied – for the first time, applying this new 3.8% tax to investment income as well as wage income. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the new tax would raise $210 billion over ten years.
It is easy to understand the temptations to impose the new tax in this way and in this place. First, by applying the tax to Medicare rather than to Social Security, the Administration escaped one problem with the original Diamond-Orszag tax (i.e., whether to credit it towards additional benefits). This problem doesn’t arise in Medicare taxation, where all participants essentially have the same benefit package no matter how much they contribute. Second, applying the tax to Medicare also allowed proponents to exploit the bookkeeping effect of an extension of Medicare solvency via health care reform, even as the money was actually being spent on expanded coverage.

All this is to say that increases taxes on affluent households is a thorny political issues, and conservatives aren’t the only people worried about alienating rich donors. It’s helpful to keep this in mind.