Tag: tax cuts

Bait and Switch

agreatnation:

“Second, this is obviously — obviously — a setup. The whole point is to avoid a vote on the middle-class tax cuts while Democrats control the House; when and if Republicans regain control, they can refuse to let anything but a full extension reach the floor. So the goal is actually permanent extension; what they’re offering isn’t a compromise, it’s a trap.”

— Temporary Tax Cuts For The Rich? No. – NYTimes.com

Which is why I fully expect Democrats to start talking up the many benefits of compromising and offering a temporary extension of the tax cuts for the rich.

A truly crafty Democratic leadership would realize the fiscal exigency of letting all the tax cuts expire as soon as possible. Thus, you hit the GOP with stalling it now (while steadfastly offering your own package of middle class relief), and then let them block these same measures from the floor because of their desire to please the richest of the rich. A two-fer. Once the outcry reaches sufficient heights, you allow the GOP to allow a middle-class-only tax plan to reach the floor.

Naturally, this means that we’ll get full extension of everything forever and give it to the GOP using terms such as “compromise.”

Serious People

Obama administration: Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s tax plan […] to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for America’s millionaires and billionaires would nearly double the projected deficit by adding $4 trillion to it over the next decade. And [the GOP is] pretending that they would pay for it through a projected spending freeze, that fails to mention what they would freeze or cut, and that would only save $300 billion over that same period of time…
Senior GOP adviser’s response: It must be tough to have to work in [the administration’s] press shop and explain that letting people keep their own money is bad, and having to explain why you think the Bush administration economic policy is bad, but you want to make it permanent. Though I’m still curious: how much does their plan add to the deficit? Is it three trillion or 3.3 trillion?

Stunning Development

A spokesman for Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that every Senate Republican has pledged to oppose President Barack Obama’s tax-cutting plan.

I am shocked beyond words. It’s almost as if the GOP is planning to oppose every measure or action before the Senate, no matter how popular, trivial, or necessary to basic function of government said measure or action may be. But we know that can’t be so. At any rate: Bad for the Democrat.

Jasen Comstock: S is for Senate

jasencomstock:

I want the Bush tax cuts to expire, totally. They were passed through reconciliation and designed to be temporary. If you are some butthurt citizen moaning about your missing $75* a year and a half from now in your tax return, you can blame the Republicans for designing a tax cut that was designed to last ten years.

Same here. Though the real play it seems to me would have been to come to the press conference the other day and say:

“The Bush tax cuts are and were a failed policy. Those days are over. Here are the Obama tax cuts, tied to expire as economic growth and recovery takes place over time (such that the deficit and debt impact will be minimized and limited to this period of crisis for the nation), and valued at the exact same amount as the entire Bush tax cuts, but pointed entirely at small business, start-ups, and those individuals and families earning below $250k/yr.”

You then torment the GOP every day between now and then about why they’re against tax cuts. What could be wrong with tax cuts?
Whether or not they pass: the GOP loses. Instead, and as usual, the administration and the Democratic party at large engages the GOP on their turf, and using the GOP’s own framing. Even if something gets done, the credit (such as it is) goes to Bush. When they expire, the blame goes to Obama. Yet these are the ground-rules “our side” chooses again and again.
Jasen Comstock: S is for Senate

S is for Senate

Steve Benen hears Boehner say this:

If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions, I’ll vote for them.

and, like seemingly everyone with a mountaintop large or small, inexplicably takes this away:

Boehner, in other words, appears to be on board with the Obama proposal

Can we just not think in this country anymore?

  1. Is Boehner in the Senate?

There is no second thing. If the answer to Question 1 is “No,” then his opinion matters fuck-all. He said this to put a patina of reasonableness on the GOP’s entirely unreasonable and indefensible position that billionaires desperately need an extra $100k come tax-time. They know this meaningless statement will get wide play, much wider (read: vastly wider) than their ultimate actions to bottle this thing up in the Senate (and even that’s assuming the feckless Democrat bothers to bring it to the floor, itself a gigantic and likely foolhardy assumption).
If and when that all happens, the GOP will simply point to (meaningless) statements like this one as examples of their genteel nature and broad willingness to “work across the aisle.” The MSM will report the whole thing as “a Democrat failure to achieve 60 votes needed in the Senate” and Broder will pronounce himself suitably delighted that the GOP tried so very hard. Truly, they are the serious adults up to DC.

Is this so very hard to understand? Apparently it is.

So the next question is simply, “What do the experts on your staff tell you that the top marginal tax rate should be in order to maximize tax revenues, leaving everything else about the tax code the same?” Journalists should relentlessly ask it of the Republican leadership in Congress who continue to make fallacious claims, and the Democratic leadership in Congress ought to ask it politely in a letter to CBO Director Doug Elmendorf.

Andrew Samwick, nailing the Laffer Curve. Add to the list of things an agile Democratic party could positively eviscerate the GOP with by attacking their perceived strengths and, you know, turning them into colossal weaknesses. See: Marriage, getting the government completely out of.

A|B Testing

Which of these tacks do you suppose the MSM will take up?

A:

-or-

B:

Answer: Serious people know it’s always bad for the Democrat. Get ready for the Demcrat Tax Bomb of 2010! Just you try and refudiate it. True deficit hawks know that, if you’re serious about the deficit you make the tough choices: like lowering taxes.

We know this is coming. Are we busily inoculating?
Are you fucking kidding me?

Invincible Ignorance

McConnell Blasts Deficit Spending, Urges Extension of Tax Cuts.
This because, as well know, tax cuts pay for themselves:

Didn’t happen under Bush, didn’t happen under Reagan, didn’t happen under Kennedy. Those were all the result of various coincidences, though.

Next up, we have Mitch McConnell, uh, still:

The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.

Uh, no. In fact, most of our current deficit driver is Bush/Cheney policy:

But, by all means, let’s not get to work explaining any of this or (gasp) using it to call the GOP out as liars and/or fools. Repeatedly. No, we’ve got the facts on our side! It’s all we need.

Unemployment extension: we cannot possibly afford such a deficit exploder; won’t you please think of the children?

Bush tax cuts: Why, we can’t afford not to extend those indefinitely. And no, we don’t need to pay for them in any way. In fact, it would be irresponsible to pay for them.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2010 GOP. An opponent whose nut(s) The Democrat finds utterly impossible to crack.

(graph via Ezra Klein)