While we’re delighted that the tax deal Obama has had to reach with the congressional Republicans infuriates his leftist base, we don’t like much else about it.

True, it would extend the present rates (what the left calls “the Bush tax cuts”), but only for two years. And – very bad – it would revive the wholly unjustifiable and positively iniquitous inheritance tax, at 35 percent on estates worth more than $5 million. It would also pay the unemployed to stay unemployed for an extra year. A further $700 billion would be added to the ever-rising national debt. Obama and the Democrats still believe that high taxes and high government spending will repair the economy. But as Winston Churchill said: “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

What particularly irks the mean, envious left is, of course, that Obama has broken his vow to end “the Bush-era tax cuts” that benefit “the rich”. The Democrats were reluctantly willing to let the present rates be extended for “the middle class”, but not for “millionaires and billionaires”. But on that point the Republicans stood firm: no tax increases for anybody. Obama gave in, apparently because he feared a stalemate.

We regret that the Republicans did not play more on Obama’s fear of stalemate to negotiate all that they wanted, including and especially no inheritance tax.

If only they had the feisty fighting spirit of this article by two optimists, Ernest S. Christian and Gary A Robbins, in Investor’s Business Daily:

The new-style, newly empowered Republicans in Congress should follow the advice given by Winston Churchill in 1941 to the graduating class of the Harrow School:

“Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Superb legislators like soon-to-be Speaker of the House John Boehner have no reason to make Faustian bargains with Barack Obama and the menagerie of union-made pols whose destructive policies so thoroughly still dominate the Democratic Party. Neither do Republican wise men in the Senate like Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch.

Republicans do not need the approval of gauzy-minded pundits at the Washington Post and the New York Times who are stuck in a 1932-65 time warp. The left-wing think tanks that once dominated thought in Washington are now intellectually bankrupt. Why listen to the architects of a failed federal government now so large, dumb and clumsy that it does more harm than good?

Ultra-bright young Republicans in the House and Senate — such as Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan — must not sacrifice the clarity of their new ideas on the phony altar of “bipartisan” compromise. They and their pro-individual, pro-prosperity, small-government policies are what the voters want and America needs. Why not have the best, instead of some diluted version?

These young Republican leaders are by intellect and character far better equipped to be president of the United States than the present incumbent. They are at the cutting edge of a reawakening in America that demands intellectual competence and moral integrity in public affairs. …

Congressman Dave Camp, soon-to-be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, understands taxes. He and Ryan know that the present tax code — largely designed and built by Democrats — does at least $2 of damage to the private economy for every $1 of tax revenue collected. And they know that raising job-killing taxes, stifling business capital investment and running up the debt are not the ways to restore prosperity to America.

In our daydreams some conservative leader in power one day makes the revolutionary proposal that people who reach the point of earning – say – over $2 million a year start paying a lower rate of income tax than anybody else. It would a terrific incentive to grow rich!

We also dream of the abolition of income tax. And sales taxes too. As Winston Churchill also said: ‘There’s no such thing as a good tax.”

But dreams aside, we’d be glad enough of a low flat rate for everybody.