Our National Deja Vu on Taxing the Rich

Four years ago, fresh off what seemed at the time to be an unusually bitter and divided presidential election, lawmakers gathered in late December to do something rare: They cut a deal. The “fiscal cliff” compromise left almost no one happy. It neither supercharged nor tanked the economy. But it did resolve what had been a 12-year argument over how much to tax high-earning Americans. That resolution is about to be overturned, with big implications for, well, how much rich people pay in taxes.