Here are some of the known trade-offs in the deal, although it should be said it is all subject to change until it's ratified by Congress and signed by Obama.
1) The Bush tax cuts for everybody will get extended for two years.
2) Refundable tax credits will be extended such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit.
3) Unemployment insurance gets extended for 13 months: Nothing however for the 99ers.
4) A 2 percent cut in payroll taxes paid by employees.
5) Business expensing: Businesses could deduct 100 percent of the cost of new investments.
6) It also includes a change to the Alternative Minimum Tax.
The truth is, emergency spending such as extending unemployment comp should have stood alone in Congress on an up-or-down vote. It should have never been part of the political deal.
The "temporary" tax breaks will additionally end up costing the Treasury an estimated $900 billion over the next two years since no offsets were mentioned to pay for them. The total package will eventually have to be financed by more borrowing from our grandchildren's lenders, either China or Saudi Arabia or both.
Russ Feingold Gets It Right Again
Sen. Feingold gets it right yet again when he voted against extending the tax cuts only for those earning $250,000 or less. Feingold's reason for voting "no" was because he believes they all should expire. Had we had more true fiscal hawks like Feingold in congress working on deficit reduction, the only trade-off left to justify the middle-class tax cuts would have been in the form of an offset elsewhere to pay for them. Instead, we not only get a continuation of the "deficits don't matter" Bush-Cheney trickle-down status quo economics, Obama capitulated and joined in with the same old Washington D.C. mentality to double-up future accumulating deficits under the guise of bipartisanship. Only a ship-of-fools would take what should have been a two-year $60 billion middle-class commitment and turn it into a $900 billion borrowing blow-out for billionaires and claim success.
Let them all expire.
5 comments:
You might want to read this. All those "concessions" are a pipe dream. The rich get theirs, we get nothing....again.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/urgent-debt-ceiling-black_b_793126.html
This deal is a nightmare right from the beginning. The democrats as usual are off message and have no marketing machine. Obama is running on empty. Unemployment comp should have never been made part of any deal. Thanks for sending the link, I wondered how the incoming freshmen would handle adding another $900 billion or more to the debt ceiling when most of them swore they'd vote to freeze it.
What is wrong with you guys......
Do you really think the Republicans alone are fiscally irresponsible?.....
Do you think the solution to get out of a deficit/employment crisis is tax individuals that currently have jobs and and working to pay for goverment entitlement programs that allocate 2/3 of every dollar to overhead?
I look back to this blog to wait for the day that you stop drinking the political kool-aid and you and Lou continue to amaze me....
Democrats and Republicans are both in office for the money. Neither came more about you than the other. Feingold is a good man that will be in office in two years instead of Kohl so let it go. The message needed to be delivered to the supermajority and Russ was a casualty in that war.
Clinton was a good president with a Republican congress. That is what's needed and in my opinion the best recipe to a good government with our current structure.
As long as there are liberals that hold true to plans that require hard working Americans that contribute to society to pay the checks for people that are leaching, there will be confrontation and dissatisfaction with Democrats.
If you look into contributions towards charities since Obama's reign you'll see a sad picture. Charities local and nationwide are horribly low numbers. That is the result of fear the government will take more. History shows those numbers directly correlate.
I for one would rather give my money to my church and have them allocate that to my community while taking maybe 10 to 20 cents of the dollar than the government taxing me and taking 66.
If you really believe all members of both parties are just in it for themselves, why are you in a large way recommending capitulating to the process? You should be in this battle with us, not go along to get along. This is more about bold-faced hypocrisy than anything else.
Cutting spending will not pay the bills nor will it help in any way to paydown the old debt. We need to start paying the piper now and stop putting off the hard choices.
Nothing is guaranteed for anyone and that includes Russ Feingold. But it would be interesting to see Feingold run against Ryan for Kohl's seat.
You honestly think it's fear of the big bad governement that is keeping people from giving to charities? Really? Wow. I would say it's a whole lot of people having a whole lot less because they are unemployed or under-employed and are more worried about keeping their own families afloat. But that's just me. One can't give what one doesn't have. This country is at the point where it can no longer sustain itself. Both sides of the isle are to blame for that. But buying in to the bs the far right is slinging.... and lets be honest here, they control the message and the media, things only seem to be getting worse and they still have no answer other than No and that the top 2% really need that extra $100,000 per year. Because, you know, that first million or so they made just isn't cutting it. It's cramping their lifestyle.
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