Everyone seems to be talking about...

...a "payroll tax holiday" these days. And everyone -- right, left, and center -- seems to think it's a good idea. Everyone, that is, except Bruce Bartlett, who, among other things, was a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House:

I just want to ask one question: What are the odds that Republicans will ever allow this one-year tax holiday to expire? They wrote the Bush tax cuts with explicit expiration dates and then when it came time for the law they wrote to take effect exactly as they wrote it, they said any failure to extend them permanently would constitute the biggest tax increase in history. Sadly, Obama allowed himself to fall into the Republican trap, but that's another story. My point is that if allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire is the biggest tax increase in history, one that Republicans claim would decimate a still-fragile economy, then surely expiration of a payroll tax holiday would also constitute a massive tax increase on the working people of America. And what are the odds that the economy won't still be fragile a year from now? Zero, I would say.