Posted on 01/02/2013 10:05:51 AM PST by whitedog57
Last night, the Republican-held House of Representatives voted for the dreadful Senate bill laughingly called The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. How is adding $4 trillion in Federal budget deficits over 10 years called relief? SOMEONE has to pay for the out-of-control spending. And that someone is taxpayers. american.taxpayer.relief.act
Here is CNBCs Rick Santellis take.
The reaction? Fiscally-blighted European countries Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain (PIGs) all saw sharp reductions in their sovereign bond yields. The US 10 year sovereign yield rose 7.1 basis points as of 12:35p EST.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 224.60 points (or 1.71%) as of 12:37pm EST. Eurozone stocks rose even more (on the hopes of eternal government fiscal fiasco).
At least corn and wheat prices fell while gold and silver rose.
Yes, Washington took the easy way out. But at least we can look forward to the debt ceiling fight where President Obama stomps hit feet and McConnell/Boehner tap their inner surrender monkey.
I am having a gyro for lunch to mourn the US going down the path of Greek fiscal policy.
The gains will evaporate by friday.
Business Socialists and Free Trader Communist Globalists LOVE high taxes, big government spending, and the redistribution of American wealth out of the US
These people cannot survive in a true free market
YOUR charts. Kill the pretense.
What's to stop you posting them here?
Oops, my bad. They are charts you "borrowed" from somewhere.
The next US downgrade?
This is easy to explain. The election, and this fiscal cliff deal, means we are no longer serious, if we ever were, about containing debt. Obama wants inflation to get out from under the debt. Equities and gold will gain as long as people have an inflationary outlook.
You wanted far larger tax hikes, I guess
So who pays for this bill, which increases the 2013 deficit by $330 billion and adds $3.9 trillion to the national debt by 2022?
If Americans want European style welfare state benefits, they need to start paying European level taxes for them rather than putting the costs on the next generations. This is generational theft.
THE REASON it adds to the debt is because the bill negates much of the 2013 tax increase. i guess some deficit hawks are aggressive tax hikers, but they usually don’t post here at Freeper.
Or,.... cut Federal benefits, which Obama offered to do but Republicans rejected allowing Obama off the hook with his own party who were angry about his offer.
"The extension of lower tax rates for the bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.
"The CBO says the budget agreement will lead to an overall increase in spending of about $330 billion over 10 years."
So yes, the cost of the bill is due to now the Obama tax cuts, but it contains little if any spending cuts. This is not a balances approach to our fiscal problems. It makes them worse. It is a bad deal when you agree to $41 dollars in taxes for every dollar in cuts. And even worse, you are going to lose jobs because many of the so-called rich are small businesses.
You don't have to be "an aggessive tax hiker" to recognize that raising taxes without any real reduction in spending. And it raises a larger question as to how best frame the issue. Right now, most Americans want to have the same level of taxation except for the "rich" who should have their taxes raised. They are in favor of spending cuts and living within our means, but they don't want the entitlement programs touched. Therein, lies the problem.
Mark Steyn, in his America not paying its fair share--You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has got to go. puts it very well.
A few months ago, I dined with a (pardon my English) French intellectual who, apropos Mitt Romney's stump-speech warnings that we were on a one-way ticket to Continental-sized dependency, chortled to me, "Americans love Big Government as much as Europeans. The only difference is that Americans refuse to admit it."
My Gallic charmer is on to something. According to the most recent (2009) OECD statistics: Government expenditures per person in France, $18,866.00; in the United States, $19,266.00. That's adjusted for purchasing-power parity, and, yes, no comparison is perfect, but did you ever think the difference between America and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys would come down to quibbling over the fine print? In that sense, the federal debt might be better understood as an American Self-Delusion Index, measuring the ever-widening gap between the national mythology (a republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens) and the reality (a 21st century cradle-to-grave nanny state in which, as the Democrats' Convention boasted, "government is the only thing we do together.").
Generally speaking, functioning societies make good-faith efforts to raise what they spend, subject to fluctuations in economic fortune: Government spending in Australia is 33.1 percent of GDP, and tax revenues are 27.1 percent. Likewise, government spending in Norway is 46.4 percent, and revenues are 41 percent a shortfall but in the ballpark. Government spending in the United States is 42.2 percent, but revenues are 24 percent the widest spending/taxing gulf in any major economy.
So all the agonizing over our annual trillion-plus deficits overlooks the obvious solution: Given that we're spending like Norwegians, why don't we just pay Norwegian tax rates?
No danger of that. If (in Milton Himmelfarb's famous formulation) Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans, Americans are taxed like Puerto Ricans but vote like Scandinavians. We already have a more severely redistributive taxation system than Europe, in which the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income tax while the poorest 20 percent shoulder just three-fifths of 1 percent. By comparison, the Norwegian tax burden is relatively equitably distributed. Yet Obama now wishes "the rich" to pay their "fair share" presumably 80 percent or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in The New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds like a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year's federal deficit. And after that you're back to square one. It's not that "the rich" aren't paying their "fair share," it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.
IMO we should have gone over the cliff. Then more Americans would have skin in the game and understand that we have some fundamental choices to make. We cannot afford the welfare state nor can the costs to support it come from the "rich." The GOP message should be that we need to reform these programs and live within our means. If the public wants all of the benefits of the welfare state, then they must pay for them. If they want lower taxes, then we must reform our entitlement programs.
I am surprised that a relatively new FReeper (conmpared to me) would support the terrible bill that was passed yesterday and see it as a tax cut. It violates every conservative principle to support this 156 page pork laden monstrosity that will add to the deficit and debt. And it sets the stage for more concessions as Congress has delayed the sequestration cuts and for more tax hikes as a tradeoff for raising the debt limit.
Please provide the specific cuts that Obama offered and cite the source. I do know that the Dems killed the inclusion of the chained CPI.
The biggest hit would have been the rise in capital gains taxes to 39%. That was avoided. But just the fact that the payroll tax cut has expired, you would think that would be enough to put some downward pressure on these markets.
the chained CPI was IN the bill that the Republicans refused to support on December 20(?) that Boehner had to pull from even being voted on. (to the joy of everyone on FR)
I never said that I supported the bill.
I simply stated that the reason the bill adds to the deficit is because it prevented the largest tax increase in history from going into effect automatically.
With Boehner in leadership and expiring tax cuts put into law by the Bush administration ... well, this was inevitable. I opposed the Bush tax cuts in ‘01 for the same reason that some conservatives voted against them ... because temporary tax cuts are just that: Temporary tax relief. I only support permanent reduction in the marginal rates. PERIOD. Any else is garbage.
I do not have any advice for the tea-party wing of the House GOP since they seem to have postured themselves out of the negotiations. Who participated in the negotiations?
DEM House members
GOP Senate members
DEM Senate members
White House
House GOP leadership
The only group that wasn’t at the table was ... HoUSE conservatives. So they are not part of the governing coalition. Seems to be by choice because their constituents prefer a non-negotiable approach. It just is too much of the stupit. Stupit is as stupit does.
From everything I have seen or heard, Obama refused to discuss any cuts in the entitlement programs and he certainly wanted nothing to do with changes to SS.
The Republicans openly admit they passed the bill to prevent the market from declining today. Yeah, that's the ticket to establish fiscal and spending policy -- by reacting to and manipulating the stock market so you don't disappoint the voters in your state. Geeze. Can things get any more screwed up?
well you must have slept through some key days of this story then, because every news outlet in the country showed that on October 18 the white house offered chained CPI as part of an overall package.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/12/18/3732908/obama-boehner-move-closer-to-fiscal.html
I never advocated tax hikes.
I simply stated that the reason the bill adds to the deficit is because it prevented the largest tax increase in history from going into effect automatically.
It is always how you frame the issue. Is it really a tax increase or a return to the previous rates? Is the end of the two year payroll tax holiday an increase? Norquist likes to say the Reps who voted for the bill were voting to cut taxes, not increase them on the so-called rich. Hence, it didn't violate the pledge.
With Boehner in leadership and expiring tax cuts put into law by the Bush administration ... well, this was inevitable. I opposed the Bush tax cuts in 01 for the same reason that some conservatives voted against them ... because temporary tax cuts are just that: Temporary tax relief. I only support permanent reduction in the marginal rates. PERIOD. Any else is garbage.
It depends on the meaning of the word permanent. The only reason that the new rates are "permanent" is that they don't have a sunset clause. The reality is that any future Congress can change the marginal rates at any time. The Bush tax rates lasted ten years, which is a fairly long time historically. You and McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts, which were only for the wealthy if you buy the propaganda.
I do not have any advice for the tea-party wing of the House GOP since they seem to have postured themselves out of the negotiations. Who participated in the negotiations?
Nonsense. The RINOs led by Boehner margalized the conservatives including conducting a purge from the various committees. The freshmen class that came in January 2011 after an historic election that gave control of the House back to the GOP and many state legislatures and other offices wanted to reduce spending and limit the size of government. When they got to Washington, they had to deal with an entrenched Rep establishment who did not share those objectives. Instead, they found that their ideas were not welcomed. They were supposed to be docile supporters of the House leadership and vote as instructed.
No spending cuts were made by the Boehner and he kept postponing the confrontation with the Dems on spending. The sequestration agreement was really a surrender to the WH and set the stage for what happened yesterday. Boehner didn't push to make the Bush tax cuts permanent in the 2010 lame duck Congress or in the 2011 debt limit ceiling fight.
The only group that wasnt at the table was ... HoUSE conservatives. So they are not part of the governing coalition. Seems to be by choice because their constituents prefer a non-negotiable approach. It just is too much of the stupit. Stupit is as stupit does.
You are spouting the Establishment line from both parties, i.e., those damn Tea Party people are extreme and won't compromise. BS. They are the ones who are standing by their principles and refuse to go along to get along. The stakes are too high to play politics as usual. By marginalizing the Tea Party (and I have been active in the movement) the Reps are inviting a third party. This last vote that saw 151 Reps vote against the bill with about half of that number voting for it, will be the catalyst to form that third party. Conservatives have had it with the GOP. I will not contibute any longer my money and time to the GOP. I am finished with them.
The House GOP and Romney for that matter, should have embraced the Tea Party instead of running away from it. The Dems and the MSM have been very successful in demonizing and smearing the Tea Party. Boehner would not be the Speaker without them. Loyalty begets loyalty.
i ain’t much of a legislative strategerist. but something is stupid. The gingrichers didn’t run away from Michel, they took over. If the teaparty wingers cannot bring down the Boehner, then the teaparty ain’t got much strength in Congress.
I suspect that the Cantor ‘NO’ vote was approved from above to allow Cantor to succeed Boehner, if necessary, and cut off a genuine overthrow.
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