On the heels of the widespread exposure of President Obama's health care law as a massive middle-class tax hike, his decision to bring back his infamous plan for "tax hikes on the rich" is an economic and political disaster.

The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed the impact of Obama's health care mandate tax and concluded: "It is now undeniable that Mr. Obama has imposed the largest tax increase in history on the middle class." So middle-class voters with serious economic anxiety will be understandably skeptical about the president's latest promise that his next round of tax hikes will spare them.  

Moreover, Obama's claim that a partisan stalemate is to blame for impending tax hikes obscures the fact that when Democrats controlled every lever of power in Washington, they did nothing to cancel the tax hikes, instead focusing almost exclusively on a health care bill that piled even more taxes on the middle class.