1/10/2013 10:40 AM
Again, I have to listen to someone saying that Republicans
broke Norquist’s pledge? Again I have to read ‘dump the filibuster’ posts on
facebook? There’s Gingrich claiming that shutting down the government in 1995
(like the GOP is again threatening to do) is why Clinton decided to work with
the Republicans, and that’s why Gingrich deserves credit for the only balanced
budgets in recent memory. And then there’s Lawrence O’Donnelll gloating last
week on his ‘Last Word’ show about how the Republicans haven’t voted for a tax
increase since Bush the Rational’s administration, but they have now…wrong.
Let’s go over this one more time.
When Obama got into office, he and the Democratic Congress followed
through on his campaign pledge: not only did taxes not go up on the middle
class, they started to go down. Don’t ask a Republican about this, he’ll lie. Read
the record, read the news from then.
The first tax increase on income since Bush the Rational
left office is the 3.8% tax on capital gains that was included in the Affordable
Care Act (Obamacare) to fund some of it. This is why the wealthy funded so many
SuperPACs trying to get it repealed. That tax went into effect 10 days ago. And
remember, NOT ONE REPUBLICAN voted for that Act. Not one.
All the income taxes that were going to go BACK up as part
of the ‘fiscal cliff’ deal were the Bush/Cheney tax cuts from 2001. Rules in
the Senate then used a PAYGO rule that could only be overridden by a 60-vote
majority. These rules mandated that budget bills cause no net deficit over the
scoring time window of ten years. But they allowed using expected on-budget surpluses
in the calculation, like the CBO’s 10-year $3.1 trillion estimate in 2001.
Long story short, the Republicans an expiration date into
the tax cut bill, returning the rates to their original levels just before the end
of the ten-year window. With that small addition, they could pass it un the
Senate’s reconciliation rules, which kept discussion to 20 hours, and prevented
filibustering by the minority party, the Democrats.
They ran pretty much the same act in 2003, with Cheney
breaking a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate, after reconciliation rules made the
bill un-filibuster-able and aligned the expiration date on those dividend and
capital gains tax cuts with the 2001 tax cuts.
So, in 2010, all of these tax rates were going back UP to
where these rates were when Bush took office. Except that Obama and a Democratic
lame-duck session decided to extended them all for two years, just to get
another year of Unemployment Insurance for all the people that Bush the Dimmer
had put out of work, and that his minions refused to provide employment for
during the 2009-2011 Congressional cycle.
Fast-forward to 2012, post-election. Again, the tax cuts are
about to expire. Only now, there’s the added ‘fiscal cliff’ of sequestration, a
mandated across-the-board cut on everything in the federal budget. Between
higher taxes for everyone and less output by the federal government, guaranteed
recession in 2013.
Since the economy has been held hostage by the TeaBagger
majority in the House, there is still massive unemployment. But the 2012
election definitely went against them by every measure, and Obama, having run
on tax increases on the wealthy, follows through. The TeaBaggers drag their
feet, and the date the tax cuts expire passes.
This is VERY IMPORTANT.
Because when McConnell gets almost all the Senate
Republicans to vote to extend the middle class tax cuts, and Boehner gets
almost all the House Democrats and a few of his moderate(?) Republicans to vote
to extend the middle class tax cuts, no one breaks the pledge to Norquist. NO
ONE votes to increase taxes on the wealthy.
Because a tax increase on the wealthy was never on the
table.
The Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy simply expired, as those
Republicans wrote them, to avoid all the House and Senate budget rules that
would have prevented them from ever passing if estimates of budget surpluses
and the costs of the cuts had been even close to accurate back at the beginning
of the reign of Bush the Dimmer.
Sure, Republicans planned to make them permanent. After ten
years, no one would notice, right? But first they needed bigger majorities in
Congress, and new budget rules. Instead, they got Obama and lost all of
Congress from 2007 to 2011.
So no Republican voted to increase taxes, O’Donnell. Ten
yard penalty for inaccurate gloating.
Which brings us to now, and the threatened shutdown.
The TeaBaggers are claiming tax increases are off the table,
since we passed them. (We didn’t.) So now they’re threatening to shut down the government
again, like they threatened in 2011, by not raising the debt ceiling. In 2011,
this cost the US its super-duper credit rating, lowering it to ‘almost
superduper’, but still, we took a hit because of these clowns.
And now Gingrich, a history professor, is rewriting history
to cheer them on. His majority in the House in 1995-‘96 twice brought the US
government to a stop, by sending Bill Clinton a balanced budget, balanced by
making massive cuts and eliminating large parts of the government. Clinton
vetoed them twice, and the citizens, seeing the Republicans show their hand on
what to cut for the first (and ONLY) time in recent history, immediately sided
with Clinton. When he instead proposed a budget that included tax increases, to
levels we are now largely back at, and Americans approved, Republicans saw the
writing on the wall. A bare few in the House voted with the Democrats against
the Republican leadership, and the Democratic Senate followed. Between these
increases in taxes and the dot.com boom, Clinton then had several years of
surpluses.
Gingrich now tries to claim credit for getting Clinton to
work with Republicans. The reality is that his incompetence gave Clinton the
huge surge in popularity polls need to overcome Gingrich’s speakership, which
ended soon after with his own party ousting him over ethics(!) violations, soon
replacing him with Denny Hastert.
You may have heard this name recently, regarding “the Hastert
Rule”, which Republicans use: no bill comes to the floor for discussion unless
the Republicans can pass it without any Democratic votes. So much for “across
the aisle” or “bi-partisanship”.
THIS is the big change that happened in the tax cut debate,
Lawrence. This is the rule Speaker (and Republican) John Boehner broke, for the
first time since Gingrich let that Clinton budget pass back in 1996. This is
the real change worth noticing. And saving the nation almost cost Boehner his
speakership.
Because, on the day those middle-class tax cuts were made permanent,
Boehner had to ask himself the same thing so many Americans should ask
themselves every day:
“Am I an American, or am I a Republican?”
Because, as Boehner showed, and as the TeaBaggers who voted
against his continuing speakership demonstrated, you can’t be both.
1/10/2013 11:57 AM
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