Posted on 01/01/2013 7:18:08 AM PST by cotton1706
So transparent. Every worthless politician will now claim that they did not violate their pledge to never vote for a tax increase. Because technically, they didn't. They just let the taxes go up automatically for a couple of hours, then voted to bring them (well, some) back down again. And shazaam! A tax cut!
Sneaky, gutless, round the bend subterfuge. Yet politics as usual.
I have been watching the stock market and it seems that the investors knew since Thursday how this would turn out.
I guess we all knew. In the end both sides agreed to raise taxes now and deal with the spending problem later.
It’s telling that Pelosi will be staging the house vote, not Bonehead.
The coming tax revolt of 2014 is going to dwarf the mid-term election success of the Tea Party from 2010.
...long live the TEA Party GOP!
Obama wanted this, now he has it and it's going to come back to screw him.
Obama wanted this, now he has it and it’s going to come back to screw him.
It’s going to screw us. We have no stomach to address the problem - entitlement spending. We have a populace that does not comprehend reality.
We have far too many people who place partisan politics ahead of doing the right thing. We will raise the debt ceiling again and the people hurt the worst are the very people they want to help. The war on poverty will make us all poor and the poor will pay the biggest price in an economy that is being destroyed systematically.
It won’t change the circumstances of the political elite like Obama or McConnell. I would call them fools, but the real fools are the American people that elected them.
Your lips to Gods ears!
Britt Hume has been tweeting that line of crap all day long.
By that argument, the bush tax cuts weren’t really tax cuts at all — after all, Bush Sr. raised taxes, and Clinton raised them even more, so it was just the cowardly guys who did nothing more than reverse the legal tax increases in place at the time.
Of course, if you really want to take that argument to it’s logical conclusion, there has never been a tax cut, since before the 16th amendment was passed, there was no income tax at all. Ever since then, it’s just been cowardly people pretending to “cut taxes” when they are really simply voting for slightly smaller “tax increases” over the previous rate of 0%.
Would you rather we keep these new taxes for a couple of years? How many years do we have to suffer before we get to count a tax cut as a tax cut?
Boy, you really don’t think much at all do you? Do you really think it’s honest legislating to have a vote at 2:00 in the morning, two hours after tax cuts expired, and return most of them to where they were just two hours before and call that cutting taxes?? Did a single person receive a paycheck in those to hours of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day that was affected by the increase/decrease?
It is a game to these people. It’s a sneaky way around honest legislation. They didn’t have the guts to vote to raise taxes if they thought it was such a great idea (which the Bush and Clinton congresses did!). No, they just conveniently had a vote after the last minute.
Why don’t you try actually thinking and recognizing what these insidious politicians do instead of spouting off like some emotional democrat.
It was actually 26 hours.
How many hours does it take before it counts as a tax cut when you pass a bill that cuts taxes from that listed in current law?
Your argument is that if we pass a law that temporarily lowers taxes, and later someone replaces it with a law that permanently lowers taxes but not as much, that the 2nd law is a “tax increase”, even though taxes will be lower than they would be if you don’t pass the 2nd law.
In 2001, we passed a law that said the top tax bracket would be taxed at 35% through 2010, and then taxed at 39.6% afterwards. That was the law of the land (we extended that 2 years). That same law passed in 2001 raised ALL the tax brackets back to 2000 levels in 2011, again extended to 2013. You can’t just pretend the law didn’t exist, or that the law didn’t include raising the tax rates after the 10-year period was over.
So under current law, the tax rates for the top 2 levels, as of January 1, 2013, for married filing jointly, were 36% for $223,050 to $398,350, and 39.60% for $398,350 and up.
Under the President’s original proposal, the top tax bracket would be LOWERED to $250,000, so while those under $250,000 would pay less than current law (the same as they did in 2012, but less than the law required for 2013), those who made between $250,000 and $398,000 would actually see their tax RATE go up from $36 under current law to 39.6%.
Under the revised proposal passed today, the top brackets are of 39.6% will start at $450,000 for married filing jointly, instead of $398,000.
So the bill finally passed gave a tax cut to all earners, compared to the 2001 tax bill, compared to the 2000 taxes if we never enacted a 2001 tax bill, and compared to the president’s proposal.
The only way to do better would have been to pass a law that permanently extended the tax rates in the 2001 bill for all earners.
That would have been best, but that doesn’t mean that what passed isn’t a tax cut. My taxes today are lower than they were yesterday. And even if I made more than $400,000, my taxes today are lower than they were yesterday.
This isn’t counting the SS payroll tax “increase”, which was a stimulus measure that had a short-term expiration date. I guess by your reckoning NOT passing a new stimulus is a “tax increase”, which would suggest that if we ever do stimulus, it has to be permanent or else it is a tax increase.
You should run for congress. You’d do great there. You probably also believe that if we increase a department budget by 10% but it was supposed to be increased by 15%, then the budget was actually cut, even though it was increased by 10%.
You can play with the numbers and semantics all you want but if my tax rate was at 28% at 11:59 PM on 12/31 and at this very minute my rate is at 28%, then my taxes have not been cut, any changes that happend in between notwithstanding. I deal in reality, not Washington-think.
But you don’t deal in reality, you deal in perception.
In reality, your taxes were cut, because if they had not voted for this bill, your taxes would be higher than they are now.
However, you PERCEIVE that your taxes are not cut, because last week you paid a certain amount in taxes, and since they passed this bill, your taxes next week will be the same as they were last week.
It’s like if you lived downstream from a dam, and the dam had a crack. Fortunately, someone notices the crack, and reports it. The engineer looks at the crack, and realizes that if they hadn’t caught it, the dam would break and you would drown. But they act quickly, and drain the lake, and you don’t drown.
So, was your life saved, or not? In reality, you were as good as dead, but now you are alive, so yes, your life was saved.
But in your perception, nothing happened. The dam didn’t break, you never knew you were in danger, and now you are alive just like you were before.
Your analogy of budgets was flawed, but it is typical of how we discuss the issue, because we treat different things as the same. In your analogy, it is the difference between costs that are known to rise, and costs that we simply assume will rise.
For example, my HOA can lock in rates for the pool company, by signing a multi-year deal, which includes small increases each year. In the 3rd year this past year, we signed a new 3-year deal, and as part of that deal, we got the company to waive the increase for this year.
Therefore, we cut spending $500 relative to what the existing contract stated. And by doing so, we were able to keep our budget balanced, without raising our maintenance fees. We didn’t cut pool spending, it will be the same as it was last year. But we cut the BUDGET, because under the existing contract spending this year would have been higher than it is now.
In other words, you can truly cut a budget, without actually cutting spending. If you claim you “cut spending”, you are making a false claim. If you claim you cut the budget, that is a truthful statement, and it also means that you have decreased the need for revenue, so it is a REAL thing you have done, not just some gimick.
Of course, much of what they count as “cuts” are just gimicks, but pretending there is no such thing as a budget cut just obscures the real problem of fake cuts.
There are many reasons to expect spending to increase year-to-year. For example, medicare spending rises in part because each year, more people are 65, and therefore more people get medicare. You could “cut” the per-person spending on medicare, and make a real improvement in our federal budget, but the total spent on medicare could still increase because more people are using it.
Anyway, everything we are doing is semantics. When we passed the tax cuts in 2001, we didn’t want to apply the budget rules, so we made the tax cuts temporary. Applying the rules would have required 60 votes in the senate, and we didn’t have 60 votes. But for 10 years, nobody treated the tax cuts as temporary, except of course for the CBO, which assumed the tax cuts would expire when determining what the deficit would be in 2011.
That’s why, when we passed the bill that just cut taxes again, it increased the deficit.
See, semantics. You can claim we didn’t cut taxes because your tax this year will be the same as last year. But the projected deficit went UP when they passed the bill — which clearly indicates that total revenues under this new bill will be lower than the total expected revenues under the old bill. That’s a “tax cut” — fewer taxes expected.
Good God. You’re a RINO’s dream constituent.
Eh, we can either have an adult conversation, or we can just reduce everything to childish name-calling.
It is a shame so many people here have chosen the latter. Fortunately, it doesn’t keep the rest of us from sharing factual information and actually discussing issues seriously.
But there is always that need to take time for a couple of posts, to figure out if there is going to be a useful debate.
For all I know, you might be a dream constituent — one of those that a politician can safely ignore, since they know there is absolutely nothing intelligent they can do that won’t keep you from being righteously indignant about something.
Or maybe when you deal with your representatives, you have a more adult manner that is conducive to changing people’s opinions.
What name calling? RINO’s and worthless politicians would love you. You speak their ridiculous language and would have them nodding their heads. I’m not interested in their or your intricate mechanics or your long explanations that say absolutely nothing.
I don’t speak that language. Most people don’t. And I don’t believe that politicians do much that is intelligent. I see no evidence that they do. They’re out for themselves and their own power so I couldn’t care less if they ignore me when I contact them, but they will hear from me.
Not sure what language you actually speak, but if you have no interest in discussions of policy, it seems odd to spend time posting to a system that is largely a discussion of policy.
On the other hand, it doesn’t surprise me that you say you don’t have interest in the discussion of the subject matter.
You can believe what you want to believe, and I guess facts aren’t for everybody.
And yes, most people don’t “think that way”. But “most people” just voted Obama back as President, so being like “most people” is hardly a recommendation.
The “fact” that most americans cannot comprehend the concept of a “temporary” measure is a sad commentary on our society. The fact that you hate the people who, through their actions, have saved you from the reality that you never even seemed to recognize, and will now refuse to acknowledge, is certainly part of the reason that the political class isn’t responding.
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