I hope you like higher taxes.
Much higher taxes.
Last night I couldn't figure out at first blush how Boehner/Reid managed to get their "numbers" to work. Well, when I looked at it again this morning, it snapped into focus, along with a backhanded comment and, yes, math.
Ok, ok, not really math. It was just a calendar.
See, the Bush Tax Cuts and the FICA holiday expire at or before the end of 2012. And guess who's going to be President then - either having just been re-elected or much worse, as a lame duck?
That's right - Obama.
So Republicans, and most-importantly "Tea Partiers" - how many of you want to keep your jobs? Because if you do, you had damn well better not allow this piece of crap from Reid/Boehner to pass! If this bill passes then every Republican who votes for it needs to face a primary challenge and every Democrat needs to be ejected from office.
In other words, we have to eat our peas, and we have to do it now. The history on this path is clear: Whenever the Congress claims they will both cut spending and raise taxes, the tax increases always happen but the spending cuts never do.
We cannot fix what ails our economy in terms of artificial economic support which cannot last forever until and unless we balance the Federal budget. It's really that simple, although nobody wants to say it. The economy has undergone a roughly 10-12% artificial "stimulus" from deficit spending over the last three years and yet as time has gone on the impact of this in GDP reports has dissipated but not only does the debt remain the deficits are remaining too!
This is the slippage that inevitably comes from longer-term stimulative efforts. "Pump priming" can work because of the surprise factor - it causes people to alter behavior. But once it becomes "not a surprise" then the behavior is no longer altered, it's now ingrained and the artificial support means that people no longer have a desire to strive forward - they instead suck on the offered "free tit" and get fat.
For those who think I was too subtle up above, let's spell it out: The Bush Tax cuts, and the FICA cut, both will expire at the end of 2012. President Obama, and he will be President on that day, will veto any attempt to extend them.
In fact, the Reid/Boehner "deficit reduction" plan that was "agreed to" last night expressly expects the expiration of all of these cuts, as does the CBO's scoring.
How do I know this? This little line in the CBO ditty:
As requested by the House and Senate leadership, CBO also calculated the net budgetary impact of the plans if the discretionary savings are measured relative to CBO’s January baseline projections.
The CBO's January baseline included expiration of both the FICA credit and the Bush Tax Cuts, as the CBO as a general rule, unless instructed otherwise, uses the state of the current law to produce it's baseline scenarios - not "what if" possible changes.
For those who say there are "no revenues" in this plan, and that there is no plan to "raise taxes", you're lying. There are monstrous revenues (tax increases) starting in January of 2013 - depending on who's numbers you use they amount to somewhere around $400 billion annually. Despite this we're still going to add close to $10 trillion in new debt to the system over the next ten years under the "Boehner/Reid" plan because there are also no actual spending decreases!
Boehner is a lying sack of used dogfood.
