For Democrats, Taxes Aren’t about Revenue

When politicians fail at the basics of governance, they embrace moral crusades and moral hysterias.
Perhaps the strangest utterance of Barack Obama’s career in public office — a career that was full of utterly bizarre pronunciations of many kinds on many subjects — was his 2008 claim that raising taxes on the wealthy is a moral imperative, even if the tax increase in question ended up reducing overall federal revenue.

Which is to say, Obama argued that it did not matter whether a tax increase hurt the Treasury, so...