“I wonder — if they simply voted again to continue ALL the bush tax cuts, and the senate had again ignored it, who would you be blaming today for your much higher taxes?”
I would be blaming those actually responsible: the moderate republicans who forced tax cuts to be temporary in the first place and the democrats and moderate republicans who continually blocked them from being made permanent.
What if that original group in 2001 had passed a bill that permanently lowered the tax rates for all the existing tax brackets, and added a new top tax rate identical to the old top tax rate, but which applied to a much higher level of income, like $330,000 instead of the $230,000 in existing law?
Would you have blamed them for not reducing it further, or would that have met your criteria for a tax cut?
Because it seems now that you are blaming the current group for permanently passing a bill that isn’t quite as good as the temporary bill that you would fault others for.
Why will you not fault everybody for not passing a bill in 2001 that set the top tax rate permanently to 30%? Or do you think that the 2001 tax rates were perfect?