I love the way the article ignores what the problem really is - that sequester y'all have been saying was no big deal for a month now. Meanwhile, try to find one that shows how much buying power was taken out of the economy by the 3% tax hike on those making over $400,000. Then find one that tells you how much buying power will be taken out by the sequester.
I don't know about the "liberals," and I doubt they all think alike as a group.
As a democratic socialist and somebody who's been reading capitalist business magazines about the US economy for 30 years now, I think it's obvious that greedy Rightwing Billionaires have been playing "games" with taxes & the US budget deficit for my entire lifetime.
And I think it's obvious that this is being done to sabotage the liberal "welfare state" -- the popular Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance & other federal programs that make American capitalism bearable for the rest of us -- in order to make the richest 1 % of the US population even richer.
Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the IMF, and not that much of of a liberal, says as much in his new book "White House Burning," about the size and the causes of our high US national debt.
Political scientists Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson, in their widely respected book "Winner-Take-All Politics," note the same pattern that Simon Johnson described.
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize winning economist, has said much the same thing in "Free Fall" and other, similar books on taxes & debts & income distribution.
The fact is, the top US "marginal" income tax rate for the richest Americans was 91 percent during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. That top rate has now fallen to about 39.5 percent -- and the wealthiest Americans are still complained that they're over-taxed.
The average corporate income tax rate was about 25 percent in the 1950s, as the Washington Post recently reported. Thanks to loopholes and "reforms" built into the tax code, it's fallen today to less than half that, and some huge US corporations - like GE -- pay no income taxes at all & instead get a refund.
Meanwhile, the US yearly budget deficit and the total US national debt have soared over the past 60 years, in part because of all the big tax breaks for the rich. And the fraction of the yearly income in this country earned by the top 1% of the families has risen from about 8.7% in 1980 to around 23.5% today -- meaning that the fraction going to the middle class & the poor has plunged.
Obama's "tax hikes" - to use your term -- are a TINY effort at trying to reverse that rotten trend, so as to make the economy a little bit fairer for people at the bottom & a lot better for the US Treasury as it tries to grapple with the deficit & the debt.
The truth is, we need MORE tax hikes on the rich individuals & the richest corporations, if we want US capitalism to function in even a moderately decent way. The big problem with Obama's tax hikes is they don't go far enough.
That article is clearly talking about the tax hikes resulting from the sequestration, which was generated by congressional republicans during the last big budget cap increase.