Cut now has a plan, revenue increases have wishful thinking…Supercommittee
by Linda Beale
GOP two-step approach problematic
Discussion continued apace yesterday about the “supercommittee” and the idea of agreeing to agree someday on some revenue increases while going ahead with cuts.
This approach is a terrible one since it gives the obstructionist GOP members just another setting in which to refuse to go ahead with tax increases and to “negotiate” yet again over just what counts as a revenue increase. Like the gimmicks that became so overused in the 2001, 2003, 2004 Bush tax bills, this “deal” is just another gimmick for the radical right to get its way–cuts to Social Security and Medicare, cuts to all programs intended to help the vulnerable, no cuts to military programs, and no tax increases–especially not for the rich.
Republicans on the right are already arguing for applying “dynamic analysis” which tends, in their versions, to be rosy scenarios of increased growth due to tax cuts: this is a cop-out way to claim revenue increases that won’t materialize while making actual cuts to much needed social programs. They are also arguing for dramatic changes in the way the earned benefits programs work–such as means-testing for recipients–as first steps in working towards outright elimination of those programs. You get comments like those of Jim Jordan (Republican of Ohio) who wrote in an op-ed in USA Today that taxes “should not punish success to satisfy some false definition of balance.” See Rubin, Debt Accord May be Two-Step Process, Hensarling Says, Bloomberg (Nov. 14, 2011).
Meanwhile, Jim Jordan (Republican of Ohio) said in a USA Today piece that taxes should not be raised because they “should not punish success to satisfy some false definition of balance.” Id.
This is a wrongheaded view of taxes. The radical right uses language about taxes “punishing success” because they see defending the rich from taxation as their mission. The rich are defined as “successful”–even if the wealth is merely built on top of inherited wealth and position, and even if the rich did nothing at all to earn the wealth. Taxes do not punish success. Taxes are the way that we cooperate together to fund important government programs that serve all of us. Even when they act as transfer programs that transfer resources to the poor and elderly, they are serving all of us by making our society work better.
originally published at ataxingmatter
New Yorker cartoon this week:
couple watching politician on television. he says to her
“he’s either psychotic or he’s appealing to his base.”
Hensarling again said no tax increases. If the Democrats had any sense, they would just walk away, if new revenue is not on the table nothing else should be on the table. They use dishonest language how can one have honest talks with people like that? Besides, SS should never have been on table to start out with.
The cartoon Coberly mentions says it all in a nutshell.
You don’t seem to understand that the wealthy deserve to have the money they have.
This is proved, conclusively and obviously, by the fact that they have that money.
The New Yorker, Nov, 14. p 40, by Barbara Smaller
Steve
I would never dispute that they deserve to have the money they have.
But when they drink all the vintage wine and break up the furniture and throw up on the heirloom carpet i would question whether they are spending it wisely.
“The Hill” reports that Reid is unwilling to consider overturning the sequestration. TPM (with a hint of faux wide-eyed innocence) recalls that Boehner said he can’t personally go for overturning sequestration. So long as the entitlement cut is limited to 2% of medical providers’ take, and the military budget absorbs a bigger cut than could be engineered in any other way, I’m with Reid and Boehner. Sequester and be done with it.
But, the Gang of 6 say they can have a bill that does about three times the damage to the deficit as the super committee’s minimum requirement ready in very short order, so apparently even if sequestration isn’t overturned in the near term, justification to do it later is being arranged.
Hensarling would go with some net tax increase if the Democrats would go with partial privatizing Medicare. What is it that makes them so determent to destroy the little social safety net that is left? In what way does SS and Medicare hurt their interests? As well off as they are, why does it hurt them so much to see a little social safety for working people? What is it to them, most of them are up there in the top income group. They and their party are morally and intellectually totally bankrupt.
Hensarling is from Texas too.
…Because the social safety net helps people they disapprove of (ie. minorities, lazy people) oe have no use for (elderly who aren’t “successful”, the disabled), all of whom they view as parasites feeding off their “hard work”.
They’d rather destroy it for everyone than give undesireables a penny….
I think “The Spoiler” comes as close to it as I have heard. There is something psychotic about what they are doing. Maybe not the creeps in Congress, they just do what they are told and probably half believe the lies they tell. But Peterson and Koch… yeah, a long line of hating “the help.”
I am trying to figure out what the rich and their minions are doing, and it makes my head hurt. Have they no idea how dangerous wrecking the North American and European economies is? Especially when the world should be mobilizing all resources to deal with Global Warming? I keep wondering, where do these guys plan to live when everything is wrecked?
Eleanor
by all reports it is very warm in the Place these guys come from. when everything is wrecked they will have done what they came here to do.