While all of the Democrats running for that party’s presidential nomination are doing so on a platform of raising taxes — in the guise of repealing President Bush’s tax cuts, which is essentially the same thing as raising taxes — Senator Lieberman is taking things a step beyond. Mr. Lieberman is proposing to slap a 5% surtax on all married couples with adjusted gross incomes above $250,000 and higher and “the equivalent income level” for single filers. In the Bush plan, tax rates for married couples max out at 35% for couples making more than $311,950. The Lieberman plan hits married couples making more than $150,000 with a whopping 39.6% rate before the 5% surtax kicks in.

Mr. Lieberman’s Web site complains that, “The 2003 Bush tax cut gives an average tax cut of $100,000 to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans — 36 percent of the total benefits.” This is rather unremarkable, however, seeing as how the top 1% of taxpayers paid 36.2% of the income tax burden in 1999, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. That this is the tax strategy being espoused by one of the more moderate candidates in the field says something about today’s Democratic Party. It says that it is too liberal to govern as the country recovers from an economic slump.