Editorial in today's Wall Street Journal:  Teeing Up the Middle Class — Joe the Plumber’s Tax Vindication Is Nigh:

Few of President Obama’s 2008 campaign pledges were more definitive than his vow that anyone making less than $250,000 a year “will not see their taxes increase by a single dime” if he was elected. And he was right, very strictly speaking: It’s going to be many, many, many billions of dimes.

Asked about raising taxes on the middle class on Sunday [talk shows, White House economist Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laid] the groundwork for taxing the middle class while claiming the deficit made them do it. The liberal establishment is even further along in finally admitting that Mr. Obama wasn’t, er, telling the truth. …

The undeniable reality is that you can’t run a European-style welfare-entitlement state without European-style levels of taxation on the middle class (and eventually without low European-style growth and high jobless rates). It’s looking more and more like Mr. Obama’s no-middle-class-tax pledge was one of the greatest confidence tricks in American political history.