In shutdown fight, the dog that didn't bark: Taxes -- By Michael Barone, The Washington Examiner

Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that did not bark. In the recent government shutdown/debt ceiling fight, there was a five-letter dog that didn’t bark: T-A-X-E-S.

Democrats insisted they wouldn’t negotiate until they negotiated, and they insisted that a government shutdown was unprecedented although it was the 17th such shutdown since people started counting under the current budget rules in the late 1970s.

But if you read their lips, the two words that were never enunciated, even silently, were “new taxes.”

This is something new. For more than 30 years, income tax rates have been a source of strenuous dispute between Democrats and Republicans.

Ronald Reagan, with the help of all congressional Republicans and a considerable number of Democrats, cut the high earner income tax rate from 70 percent (on “unearned” income) and 50 percent on wage and salary income first to 38.5 percent and, in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform, to 28 percent.

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