Posted on 12/19/2012 12:08:21 PM PST by Perdogg
A very strong statement from Speaker Boehner:
"Tomorrow the House will pass legislation to make permanent tax relief for nearly every American -- 99.81% of the American people. Then the President will have a decision to make. He can call on the Senate Democrats to pass that bill or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history."
(Excerpt) Read more at minx.cc ...
“But 0bama telling the truth is not possible.”
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I would guess that he might tell the truth in a narrowly defined instance in which doing so would be the best and easiest way to accomplish his goal of destruction. Is that actually possible? I can’t say.
You are probably about right. The left is so much better at playing the game than the conservatives are. Most conservatives still want to cling to the fallacy that the voters know what they are doing and the conservatives don’t know what to do if they should ever accept just how stupid the mass of voters are. Conservatives don’t really understand how to appeal to total stupidity but the left has done everything to create and promote that stupidity and they know perfectly how to use it to gain power.
If anyone notices that I don’t include myself in either group it is because even though I am very conservative I have abandoned the notion that voters at large know what they are doing, it has been made perfectly obvious that they do not. No one who has a clue about reality ever even considered voting for Bill Clinton, let alone Obama.
This is the trap of elected government, you CANNOT allow anyone over a certain age to vote regardless of any other considerations, it leads to what we have right now. We could ask villages all over the country to pick their favorite idiot and send him to Washington, name the best looking idiot as leader and we would have something very much like what we have now, it might even be better.
My understanding is that Pelosi herself supports the notion of raising taxes on incomes of a million dollars and up. It will be interesting to see whether she votes against plan B.
Worse yet,
Pelosi originally proposed that same idea B as a rhetoric club to beat Republicans with (just extend below $1M) back May 23 in a letter, and now she will line up House members to vote against it because Bohner FINALLY called her bluff.
But Republicans appear not capable of using Dems words as weapons against them like Dems do,against them(Rs) . That is why they (this congress) ALWAYS LOSE these fights to Dems.
This House took on three key battles last year and lost them all (getting whatever crap Obama didnt care about) : The 2011 budget, the debt limit extension 2011, then the FICA tax cut extension a year ago.
On the first two the R words/phrases that Ds used as deadly weapons were :
“ Rs are saying Shut it down” then on the second “Rs are saying Default”
Bohner has them home now to keep from repeating that but as you can see the new catch phrase for O to use is
“Republicans are saying Lets go off the cliff”
I listened to Boehner yesterday, and I think he did OK.
He said that Obama has been saying he wants to tax millionaires and billionaires, so Boehner said he agreed to taxing millionaires and above.
Personally, I think it was necessary and shrewd use of the media, and it shielded almost everyone included in the Bush tax cuts. (If I had my druthers, I’d raise taxes to 1% on everyone not now paying income tax, even if they do pay payroll taxes, because everyone should have some skin in the game.)
I think under Boehner’s plan that 99.3% of Americans get to keep their Bush tax cuts.
Ideally, we’d get rid of all income taxes and go to the Fair Tax, but it doesn’t look like that dream is gonna happen in my lifetime.
I listened to Boehner yesterday, and I think he did OK.
He said that Obama has been saying he wants to tax millionaires and billionaires, so Boehner said he agreed to taxing millionaires and above.
Personally, I think it was necessary and shrewd use of the media, and it shielded almost everyone included in the Bush tax cuts. (If I had my druthers, I’d raise taxes to 1% on everyone not now paying income tax, even if they do pay payroll taxes, because everyone should have some skin in the game.)
I think under Boehner’s plan that 99.3% of Americans get to keep their Bush tax cuts.
Ideally, we’d get rid of all income taxes and go to the Fair Tax, but it doesn’t look like that dream is gonna happen in my lifetime.
Democrats all the time: “Tax the rich!”
Republican Plan B: “Tax the rich!”
What’s the difference?
I think we need to introduce a 30% surtax on income earned by actors in movies and television. This would be over and above any regular income tax that these people have to pay. Since they almost universally complain that they don’t pay enough taxes, lets give them their wish.
If that works then we can institute the same surtax on editorial writers for newspapers with subscriptions over one million.
Also make it a policy that if anyone publicly complains that they don’t think they pay enough in taxes, that they be automatically subject to a full IRS audit.
The difference is that gutting the military with a trillion dollars in cuts come January is a non-starter.
The military cannot tolerate 100 billion in cuts per year.
Every time this nation in the past has gutted it’s military, it has cost untold amounts of blood in our next conflict.
So, until we win the presidency, we must do what good we can, and gutting the military is worse than a 3% tax increase on about 7/10th of a percent of Americans.
Actors, editors, and complainers....
I agree with your entire stated plan.
So far as Boehner is concerned, there is only one sort of friendly news outlet for republicans. They lost the media war during the election, and they’re losing it now.
If Boehner can get the nation to hear his “I agree to tax millionaires and above”, then it might get their attention.
So far as the spending cliff is concerned, I think that gutting the military is a huge mistake.
Personally I am in favor of doing an across the board 10% cut in budget for every Federal Department for the next 3 years including the defense budget. I also think that we have way too many Generals and other high mucky mucks in the military, especially considering that we are not currently engaged in something like WWII. We also have way too many stupid bureaucrats in the pentagon and too many vendors who have landed cushy construction jobs because they know the right Senator or Congressman.
So I favor cutting everything by 10% immediately and telling the secretaries of each department that they need to deal with the fact that they are only going to have 90% of the money they had last year to deal with this year.
I would not suggest that any member of the military have their pay cut, but then military pay for enlisted personnel has never been a big budget issue. The problem in the military is that it is top heavy. An across the board cut of 30% over 3 years is not going to kill anyone. I've had to do that several times in my lifetime. Austerity is everyone's problem when you are 20 trillion dollars in the red.
I say the House should pass a bill which makes all the Bush tax cuts permanent, and adjourn until after New Years.
My very youngest son, an engineer and a civilian, makes more than a bird colonel. The colonel has 20 years in age and 15 years in experience on him.
How do you propose keeping top quality people in the military? The military has some of the most dynamic leaders of our nation in some of the most critical jobs of our nation working for less than the maximum military pay of about 170,000 a year, the pay of a general. Gutting and hollowing the military of its best people is crazy, but most field grades and above could find higher pay, and some of them, far higher pay, working in the civilian sector.
That aside, the idea of an across-the-board cut for every budget anywhere in government also appeals to me. If they’d actually do a 10% across-the-board, I’d sign on right away. But they won’t.
But a trillion dollars out of the defense budget is more like an annual 20% for them.
And what you’d end up with is the lobbyists and congress-critters deciding how that remaining 80% would get spread around. Troops are always easiest to hit. They will cut the number of troops, because that is easiest and preserves all the pork, and they will argue they can do the same with planes and bombs.
And, if that were true, we would have spent 6 months in Iraq and 3 months in Afghan.
How about increasing the salary of commissioned officers by 30% but reducing the number of such commissioned officers by 50%.
There's a 20% cut in cost and I suspect that it would have little effect on overall efficiency. In fact overall efficiency might be increased as there would be fewer chiefs and more indians. Almost every level of the federal government, including the military is top heavy.
I would suggest that congress just inform the Pentagon (and every other federal department) that they have 10% less money next year than they had this year and let them figure out where to cut. If there is a problem, congress can always deal with it by way of emergency appropriations.
It’s a more difficult issue due to the sifting, training that’s required to get to the most qualified.
As with any organization that promotes from the lower ranks, one must have both sufficient lower ranks and sufficient opportunity for advancement in order to retain the best.
Everyone raved about Petraeus in his heyday, but odds are many his equal or better left the military as majors because they knew the odds of advancing to general grade was less than a quarter of a percent.
So much of that is luck, connections, nepotism, etc., that the truly good must see a pathway to making a contribution.
No chamber can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other chamber, but who follows the Constitution anymore? Certainly not the American people and their “leaders”
OK, so the House comes back into session, makes a motion that Reid is a doofus, and immediately adjourns for another three days.
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