Wrong on Bush Tax Cuts: How Do the Democrats Disguise it?
The Democrats must be ordering a lot of makeup these days — along with wigs, masks, and camouflage gear. You see, they will have to keep a lot of the Bush tax cuts and will need to disguise this.
They have to keep them because to let them expire is to stuff sleeping pills into the economy’s maw.
They have to know why small businesses are not investing in expansion. They have to know why our jobs machine, once so dependable, sputters today. They must know why investors have stashed so many trillions on the sidelines.
It is the uncertainty of future taxes and regulations. Who wants to invest in his business when he does not know what his taxes will be and when he knows big tax increases currently lie ahead.
The Democrats must know $75 billion in new taxes next year (and $1.4 trillion over 10 years, according to Michael Boskin in the Wall Street Journal) could push the economy into a coma. It could certainly stifle job growth.
The Congressional Budget Office agrees. In fact, it nearly doubles down on the figures. It estimates $115 billion next year and $2.6 trillion by 2020.
Now, they may not read the bills they pass. But the Democrats must be aware that the CBO predicts big damage if they let the tax cuts expire.
They need the makeup and disguises in order to finesse what they must do. They must keep all or most of the Bush tax cuts or they must replace them with other tax cuts. They cannot afford to drug the economy with tax increases at this stage.
How do they pull this off?
They can’t very well say Bush was right — not after attacking his cuts for years. Karl Rove will feast on them.
They can hardly admit their opponents were right — the critics who called for tax cuts 18 months ago, not to mention those who months ago called for Congress and the president to announce they would extend the Bush cuts.
Also, there is a swig of castor oil you must take when you admit your opponent is right. You must concede you were wrong. If they extend tax cuts now, they concede their recovery plan was wrong. With it, they spent, rather than cut. They gave the back of their hand to small and mid-sized businesses. In this they were wrong and dumb and out of touch with the real world of job creation.
Yes, they can say they spent the big bucks to save us from a depression. They can say that now that we are saved, they will stimulate with lower taxes. They can tell us they planned to do this all along. They will need a ton of mascara and pancake for that case.
The president already tested the first few lines of that act. He claimed he saved us from a depression. The wig slipped when he went on to suggest he also saved a few million jobs. Perhaps he was auditioning for work in a comedy club when he leaves Washington. Abbott and Costello. Obama and Gore?
The Democrats’ opponents are trying to two-step them into a corner these days. Orrin Hatch begged them, in USA Today, to stop the tax hikes. “How would it look if we danced to Orrin’s music?” That question makes them toss and turn at night.
Newt hums the same tune as Orrin. He also smirks when he suggests they cut taxes — and spending. They probably kick their Cheshire cats these days.
They no doubt are tempted to mix and match. The could allow tax increases on higher earners, while they give lesser earners tax breaks. They may feel that would work wonders for them in November. Perhaps it would. But when Congress’s approval rating sits below that of child molesters (at 11%, per Rasmussen), all bets are off. They clearly have misjudged how the public would feel about various issues the last 18 months.
If they don’t cut taxes, they are cruisin’ for another bruisin’, in the form of recession. If they do cut them, they may get a snoutfull of humble pie. And lipstick on that snout will probably not protect them.
They are in a quandary — and they deserve to be. Poor thinking and awful policies should come home to haunt people.
When the House and the Senate are either in Republican hands or mostly so after November, Obama will place the blame for the continuing recession on them for blocking his grandiose economic plans.
But if by chance the House and Senate manage to repeal all or most of the Obamacare debacle and push through tax cuts for small businesses and the wealthy, and thus save the economy and drastically reduce unemployment, then Obama will take credit for it. He will simply claim that under his benevolent watch, the House and Senate did exactly what his administration wanted them to do.
The question is whether Barack Obama, the Spendthrift in Chief, can fool the voters one more time.
Clinton could do that because he has absolutely no principles. At the core of his beliefs is a vacuum. Obama will have a harder time, and I don’t think he can do it, because he really is a radical leftist and, short of a Road-to-Damascus-like revelation, he thinks his ideology is really correct. Communists all over the world attribute its failure to the theory that it was not tried in the right place or that it was not pure enough. The faculty lounge is not the spot to find experience in practical things, especially running countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/us/politics/22gitmo.html
Executive order #1—close Guantanamo!!Obama is smart, evil Bush/Cheney/Rove are dumb.
moron: accurate self-identification
I don’t think the Democrat Party congresspersons have misjudged how the public would feel about their behavior for the last 18 months. I don’t think they have cared. They will continue to push forward with their agenda no matter what the cost. After all, I’m sure there are plenty of mid-to-high level government positions in the future for anyone who votes ‘the right way’ now.
Someone might also point out that there is plenty of unspent Porkulous money that can “offset” extending the tax cuts, which means extending them would really be deficit neutral…. unlike, say, ObamaCare.
The Democrats are stuck on ideology and past Bush baiting. Anyone who thinks these were tax cuts for the rich either does not do his own taxes, is a lying idiot, or does not pay taxes. There will be some very surprised people when they look at their withholding for January and suddenly discover they are the rich the Democrats have been attacking. They will not be happy.
How convenient for the Dems that the tax cuts expire AFTER the elections.
Doesn’t matter the damage they have done already will bring them down in November regardless of anything else they do! What has happened since Democrats took over all branches of the Legislative and Executive branch and almost the Judicial branch of our government at the Federal level has scared most of the public to such a degree that they overshot and will be punished severely in the soon upcoming elections!
Folks are mostly figuring out Obama lies, cries and economy dies. Simple stuff.
The taxes are just the final torpedo to the economy. Small and medium business haven’t rebounded because demand has not rebounded. Demand won’t rebound until after Obamacare and all the Czars and regs and the neo-Keynes-Marx rules, regs, etc., are well known. All productive workers are simply not going to bet on The One. They’re all from Missouri now.
Taxes, imho, are, at best, like talking about how a hurricane is about to hit while you’re neck deep in lava from the volcano. Continuing the Bush tax cuts, in whatever form, simply will not have much of an impact. If they don’t continue all of them, then it will, as Morgan points out, be a negative.
Obama has stripped the forest, plowed the ground, salted the earth and doesn’t have enough paint to make thinks look green again.
Why would they want to hide it at all? Couple an extension of the existing tax environment with . . . oh . . . say, card check, or cap-and-tax, or any of the other pet far-left agenda items that the present majority hasn’t the guts to come out and adopt pre-November. That way the outgoing majority can, on its way out the door, demonstrate to its base that no, in fact, they didn’t get thrown under the bus, and if the party re-attains the majority see what there is to come. Having so spectacularly lost the independents, why not shore up the base? That puts the Rs into the position of either acquiescing in furthering a complete transformation of American society along quasi-socialist lines, or alternatively being cast as the villains for having “caused” a massive tax increase and thereby delivered a head-shot to the economy. Unless the world shifts off its axis there will not be a 2/3 majority for the Rs alone in either house, not even together with such genuinely conservative Ds as actually exist and will have the guts to defy their leadership. So the most likely situation is the Rs will have to ask themselves whether they think they can repeal card check or whatever over a veto, or alternatively retroactively extend the tax regime, again over a veto. Neither is likely.
I don’t think the Obamunist techno-fascists’ motives are what you think they are, Mr. Morgan. In fact, I think our assumption that they’re well-intentioned but inept or misguided has been incorrect and self-destructive all along.
Republicans need to make it as easy as possible for Democrats to reverse course and extend the tax cuts. The more embarrassing they make it, the less likely they will do it. That is, unless Republicans are more interested in scoring political points than in rebuilding the economy.
The Republicans will probably have a majority in the House after the elections. At that point their job is simple – they need to pass popular bill after bill and let them get shot down by the Democrats in the Senate and/or vetoed by Obama. They need to put aside any compromises that expand spending or the size of government, and also any pet projects that have gone by the wayside since 2006. I doubt they have the discipline to do it, but that is what *should* be done.
Well, kabuki theater is what they do. It’s just dangerous now because people actually have started buying it.
Few acts reveal the hypocritical cynicism of the Democrats as does their eagerness to raise taxes in a recession.
The same Keynesian theory they use to justify government borrowing and spending to “stimulate” the economy also says that raising taxes suppresses economic growth. Indeed, Keynes held that you could regulate the economy up or down by borrowing and spending when times where bad and taxing when times where good to prevent the economy from “overheating.”
I think Keynes was wrong but his theory is internal consistent. The Democrats, however, cherry pick Keynes to one end: increasing the amount of money that flows through there hands. When times are good they use Keynes to justify raising taxes to slow the economy to a safe level. When times are bad, they use Keynes to justify borrowing money to “stimulate” the economy. Then they suddenly toss Keynes out the window and say they want to raise taxes anyway.
It’s always about increasing the power of the Democrats and putting the rest of us under our their thumb. Even when they try to “help” people they always choose the mechanism that makes the people helped forever dependent on the Democrats.
Frankly, I think they’ve been at this for so long they’ve even forgotten why they do what they do.
Look at the GDP figures and you can clearly see that the Depression did not end with America’s entry into the war, it started when the country threw out the Democrats in a big way in ’38, finally having had enough.
Well, I don’t get it either.
Candidate Obama campaigned on the “middle class”, i.e. those making less than the magic household income of 250K or 200K, would not “see their taxes go up one dime.” So alright already, write the legislation to extend the “Bush tax cuts” on us “little people” and then take credit for your campaign promise that you were going to right an injustice of the “tax cuts on the rich.”
Once you set that in motion, that open up to whole tax rate structure to “tinkering.” Then you can do your back room deals regarding tax rates on capital gains, dividends, etc. to prevent the economy from melting down.
As it is, Jan 1 2011 is right around the corner, you people haven’t even started drafting tax legislation, and come Jan 1 all of us little people are going to be whapped with a huge increase in withholding, especially many of us who haven’t been paying Federal income tax (but have been paying FICA all along).
This is such a train wreck in the making.
The fact of the matter is that the Bush/Cheney/Rove tax cuts were largely responsible for the Bush defecit. The fact also is that we will have a lame-duck congress after election day and the Dems and a few R’s will amend the tax code and Bush’s cuts for those over $250,000 will revert to the pre-cut tax rates and the rest of us will see no change. Additionally, the mortgage interest deduction will be capped, probably at the top of the 10 percent tax rate or somewhere around $15,000 for married filing jointly.
It’s interesting–your concept of “fact” pretty much exactly equates to the concept of “wild-eyed lefty disinformation” for the rest of us.
Didn’t say I wanted my scenario to happen, only that it will happen that way. Not “disinformation. Disinformation is a lie, or an untruth, I am only stating what is going to be. It’s a prediction. R’s will win Senate in November and maybe House but the lame-duck congress will pass the remainder of Obama’s agenda before January. If you think I am wrong, give me a reasonable argument, name-calling is for little kids and immature adults.
The Democrats have spent years calling the Bush tax cuts “tax cuts for the rich”. They hope us non-rich won’t notice our taxes going up next year and make the connection. Also, I’m not wild about my employer’s taxes going up. Every dime he sends to Washington is another dime that won’t trickle down my way. A wage freeze is not a tax hike but its hard to eat on the difference between them.
To me the question is simple, do we want bigger government controlling more of our life and thus needing more of our hard earned dollars to do it. Or a smaller government less intrusive in our lives taking less of our money. I vote for the latter every day.
The author of this article seems to be laboring under a few surprising delusions. First, the author assumes that politicians will be compelled to do something, merely because not doing that thing would harm the country. Second, the author believes that politicians understand the connection between their own actions and the real-world economy. Third, the author assumes that given a choice between a) admitting you’re wrong, and b) harming the country, politicians will choose option A. I would say that all three of these things are demonstrably untrue. Sadly, the article has convinced me that they probably will let the tax cuts expire.
Republican wise men forget that if-as in 90% of Calif business people I know-you’ve drawn in your horns because as of June 2008 the future was obvious, there are not enough profits to tax at the higher rate. Even if tax cuts do not expire, the horns stay. It’s not like the first 18 months of 100% control have not already justified moving the money to the sidelines, causing the ’08 crash.
The only way out is to go after the money in the mattresses by transferring 401k & IRA money to Social Security, or shrink entitlements 80% minimum. Business tax cuts would have worked 12 months ago but now the die is cast.
I concur, completely. The looting won’t stop until all the loot is looted. The War is at your door.
-if tax cuts for the rich are so great for the economy, why aren’t they working? I mean we’ve had them for more than a few years now and that money ain’t invested in nothing but someone’s boat. It’s like “trickle down” economics from the 80′s….it never trickled down to me, and i worked to make my boss profitable. He bought the boat, i got the 5 cent raise….