You are supposed to hate this deal, because the rich will pay higher taxes, which is bad for you in ways that the republicans, and the conservatives, have failed to adequately explain to you or others. They are correct, but you’d never know it.
You are supposed to hate this deal, because you are supposed to believe that, contrary to all evidence and common sense, Obama was on the ropes and could have been forced to accept a deal identical to the deal we barely passed in 2001 when we had a republican president, a republican senate, and a republican house.
You are supposed to hate this deal because, in spite of the fact that the tax bill is a completely separate bill from the sequestration bill, you are expected to believe that it was imperative that a new bill to cut taxes had to also include spending cuts.
Tomorrow, everybody’s taxes go up tremendously. After that, there would be pressure to lower taxes, because people like lower taxes. Forget sequestration — that’s a different bill — and frankly there is no true political pressure to do much of anything with that, except for the angst over actually pretending to cut spending.
So you have to ask yourself, as do all conservatives — given a tax rate identical to that of January 1, 2001, and a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit (as opposed to the on-paper SURPLUS in 2001 — what possibly deal do you really think you could get?
2001 - Republican President just elected, with Republican Senate (barely - 50/50 with tiebreaker going to republicans) and Republican House. Technical Budget Surplus, ran on across-the-board tax cuts. In that environment, the best we could do was a temporary 10-year tax cut, which reverted in 2011 (and was extended then for a 2-year-period).
2013 - Democratic President just relected, with Democrat Senate (55-45) and republican house. Huge budget deficit, president ran on NO TAX CUTS for “the rich”. In this environment, do you really believe we would EVER get a deal like the bad one we got in 2001. The deal we currently have on the table — PERMANENT tax cuts for everybody making under $400,000 a year.
You should oppose this, because taxes are already too progressive. But it is hard to see how we would have done much “better”. The solution was to do “worse”, meaning NOT approve tax cuts for anybody. But that’s a hard sell. Technically, the tax pledge would work against anybody wanting to vote AGAINST tax cuts for 99% of us, even though it is the right thing to do.
I see your point, but there aren’t any Tax Cuts. Tax Rates for the under $400,000 crowd will remain unchanged.
There are only Tax Increases for the over $400,000 crowd.
I realize we are dealing in semantics, but Obama will get credit for doing what President Bush did, cutting Tax Rates.
The only reason there was a ten year limit was because the Tax Rate Cuts, which RAISED Tax Revenue BTW, were not passed with a Super Majority in the Senate, therefore they contained a Sunset Provision. Too bad Spending Bills don’t meet the same fate.