You’d never know it watching the news, but all this posturing about Republicans never agreeing to tax hikes is a fraud. They already did! Ultimately, they own the sunset provisions they voted overwhelmingly for 10 years ago. Those provisions had to be there, or else the deficit numbers would be horrible. And guess what? They are!
So, instead of breaking faith with seniors who’ve already paid for their benefits, instead of piling cuts onto the most vulnerable victims of the enduring recession, instead of taking any Boehner deal his caucus won’t ratify anyway…
Bring On The Bush Tax Hikes!
Please share widely!
think alike.
the President, due to speak any minute, pulls back from this nonsense. His offer on Monday went too far, it’s still not good enough for these nuts. And the Plan B farce should prove they’re not going to budge.
But naturally Hoyer and Van Hollen are saying the Monday offer, with Social Security cuts, is a good “starting point” for further negotiations. Just a day after Obama said he already went “more than halfway.”
If something is a good idea then it’s a good idea. If we thought tax cuts were good in 2001 why not just legislate for 2001? Leaving it open-ended does not preclude a later Congress from enacting superceding legislation to raise taxes.
Ditto for something like the assault weapons ban. When it was enacted in 1994 did people really think maybe those weapons would be OK in 2004? Again, if a later Congress judges that to not be the best policy they are well within their rights to take the initiative and repeal the law.
Changes in laws should require initiative on the part of Congress rather than simply expire because they were not reauthorized, IMO.
were added because if the cuts didn’t sunset in ten years, the budgetary impact would have precluded the use of reconciliation to get them passed.
It’s was good to make taxes a perennial issue.
Can be a great thing, particularly when it comes to budgetary issues. Case number one: the tens of billions of dollars given away as corporate tax credits and write offs via the state’s supplemental budget. Once one of those goes in, it practically never goes away, even if the original reason for its existence ceases to exist.
That might have been the only way to get some pro-gun Dems to vote for it, but thats still terrible. The Voting Rights Act should also be made permanent.
Which was, I think, 51-49 Dem thanks to Jim Jeffords. The farce is that Bush justified the tax cuts in 2001 because we had a “surplus” and “that money belongs to the American people.” He likened it to giving a cashier a $5 bill at the store and you only owe $4.79. They give you the change.
Fast forward to 2012, when the conservative media wants to discredit Bill Clinton as a surrogate for Obama. Turns out, they say, there was no surplus under Clinton at all, because it was really a mild deficit if you don’t count the money borrowed from Social Security.
I’m all for counting IOUs to Social Security, legally binding Treasury bonds, as deficit spending just like bonds owned by anyone else. It’s honest accounting. But the GOP can’t have it both ways. If there was no surplus in 2001, there was no need to give the “surplus” back to “the people” in grossly disproportionate shares.
What they can’t dispute is that the “deficit” at the end of the Clinton years was teeny tiny compared to the Reagan deficits before it and the Bush II deficits after. Hate to see those calculated including the funds borrowed from the Social Security trust fund.