In a Friday memo to all House Republicans, GOP leaders came out against nearly all the major proposals in Obama's $447 billion job-creation plan, including his middle-class tax cuts and his approach to federal spending on transportation and school construction.
The Republican leaders said cutting payroll taxes through 2012 would lead to a tax increase in 2013 -- an argument that didn't deter Republicans from a much bigger, 10-year tax cut in 2001 that was extended last December but is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2012.
"There may be significant unforeseen downsides to large temporary tax cuts immediately followed by large tax increases," they wrote in their memo. "We are creating significant new uncertainty in an already uncertain economy."
This is just fucking crazy. They are now actually arguing that we can't cut taxes now, because when they return to their original level at a later date, that would be a tax increase. Am I the only one that sees the abject lunacy and idiocy in this argument? This is really what one of our major political parties now uses to justify its infantile bull shit? And as many people have already noted - Republicans have finally found a tax cut that they don't like. Why? Because the payroll tax overwhelmingly benefits the wrong kind of people - poor and middle class citizens. If we were proposing a 200% tax increase on the working poor while abolishing capital gains and the top marginal tax rate, you know they'd be on board. They did vote for the Ryan plan after all.
Anyone that has paid even one ounce of attention to politics for the last two and a half years know that the Republicans will never support anything the President proposes. So I will admit that while the American Jobs Act is long overdue and a much needed economic stimulus, I have never really seen its path through Congress. Sure the President wants us to call our congressmen and women, even the asshole Republican ones, but does anyone honestly believe that Democratic constituents calling Republican representatives and senators is going to make them shift from them their putrid ideological entrenchment?
I think really the most likely scenario is that the economy is going to continue to suck tremendously well into the 2012 election season, thereby endangering Obama's re-election. We will get some sort of movement on economic stimulus between now and then, but it will be purposefully hamstrung by the Republicans who will ensure that it is a series of half measures or contains a bunch of their bull shit ideological sacred cows that will do nothing to stimulate the economy. The President's only chance between now and then will to be continue to bring Campaign Obama both to the American public and to his style of governance. If you can't get anything through Congress, then the one thing you can do is present an unmistakably stark contrast between the two parties values and ideas on how to rebuild a broken America. That started with the roll out of the American Jobs Act, and it continues with this:
President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials.
With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid.
Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages.
Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday.
Republicans will never in a million years support a tax increase of any kind, especially not one on millionaires, or the "job creators" as they are known among the mouth breathers. The problem that faces the Republicans is that a millionaire's tax is overwhelmingly popular with the public. They can spew all the bull shit they want, but the fact of the matter is that the public intuitively understands that there is a infinitesimally small slice of the population that controls pretty much all the wealth in this country, and they pay an absolute pittance in income taxes. As the NYT piece says, this tax would hit about three-tenths of one percent of tax payers. It doesn't matter how the GOP and Fox News try to spin it, with all the caterwauling about job killing tax increases or the delicate fee-fees of our job creating plutocrat overlords, the public is just not going to care when you're talking about hitting such a small portion of the tax base with this increase. It's good policy, and even better politics.
Again, the Buffett Rule faces an even steeper uphill climb in Congress than does the American Jobs Act. But these are the sort of populist positions that Obama should have been taking long ago, since January 2009 on his first day in office. The public saw far too much of Obama as the most reasonable guy in the room. Maybe it's finally catching on that when you're in a room full of unhinged lunatics that want to savage the founding principles of this country and hand it over to rule by corporations and plutocrats, being the most reasonable guy doesn't count for much. Americans want someone on their side, and Obama appears to be finally understanding that.
No comments:
Post a Comment