In their scorched-earth effort to deliver another $700 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthy, Republicans have fittingly appropriated their favorite global warming talking point: "uncertainty." Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner are just of the GOP leaders claiming "Congress ought to act today to stop all the tax hikes" because "it would reduce the uncertainty that's affecting employers all across our country." Of course, they are predictably silent about the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan upended the tax code four times in five years, including "the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime." And despite conservative warnings then as now about "job-killing tax hikes," American businesses responded by adding 23 million jobs after President Clinton raised upper-income tax rates in 1993.

Since the age of Reagan, the Republican electoral strategy has been "you can fool some of the people some of the time and that's our target market. At least, that is, when it comes to taxes.

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Launching his campaign for House Speaker this summer, Minority Leader John Boehner decried President Obama's "job-killing tax hikes" and called the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich "a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit." His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell told Fox News, "It would be a disaster." On Meet the Press, Dick Armey rejected the notion of returning the tax rates for the top 2% of earners back to their Clinton-era levels, mocking Obama's "new cockamamy ideas" and insisting the President "not raise taxes and take away the return on an investment"

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But as Michael Hiltzik wrote in the Los Angeles Times last week, "'uncertainty' isn't the real reason they're not hiring." Poor sales, and not the uncertainty over taxes cited by the likes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are at the heart of the problem for small businesses. And as former head of the Obama Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer put it today:

Uncertainty is likely holding back the recovery. But its sources are far more fundamental than the tax and environmental issues that typically top the list of complaints. And the solution is certainly not for the government to do less. Rather, it needs to do much more.