Democrats Show Ineptness Once Again - Run Scared on Tax Cuts

I told you they had serious PR problems. Putting this issue up for a vote, forcing Republicans to defend tax cuts for the rich and daring them to vote against cuts for the middle class would have been a winner for the Dems. Harry Reid is incompetent, and I have been saying it for at least a year...not long after he became Senate Majority leader.

And one reason they are running scared (besides the Blue Dog weaklings worried about holding their seats) is because they may be preparing to cave altogether on the Tax issue, as I suggested weeks ago. After the election... watch them cave and renew all of the Bush Tax cuts...including the tax cuts for the rich, which will cost us $700 billion on top of the debt that all the other tax cuts and the other deficit spending will cost (which is in the trillions). Democrats are so scared of the Republican media machine that they are running with their tails tucked between their legs... with just the mere threat that they may be hurt by attack ads or specifically targeted to be unseated in the midterm elections. This is a perfect example of how powerful the right wing media is...and it is also an example of why there should be a Progressive alternative... a Progressive media infrastructure which could act as a counterbalance.

Can we resurrect Tip O'Neal or bring back George Mitchell? How about Adam Clayton Powell? Seems to be a lack of people with courage in Congress. The U.S. will end up in one crisis after another...instead of preventing the next crisis ahead of time with corrective policies, because everyone is more concerned with the next election.

America is screwed, especially if it can't get spending under control within a few years.

Related

The "Taxes Are Too High" argument is a Republican media illusion

Why the GOP's love of tax cuts hurts African Americans

At what point do Americans need to reconsider our old political stereotypes? I would say the time is long past due. For too long Americans have labored under the misunderstanding that the Republican Party is the party of fiscal discipline, low taxes and limited spending. The great mystery is how this myth survives year after year.

Read the rest at The Loop.

Obama Administration Under Pressure to Extend Bush Tax Cuts

The Obama Administration is under serious pressure to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Insiders have been suggesting over the past week, that Obama & Co. is flirting with the idea of caving. Extending these tax cuts would dig the nation into an even bigger debt hole. Once again Republicans - who claim to be concerned about annual deficits & the national debt - are saying one thing and doing another, as is normal for them.

The Republican media has carefully framed the expiration of the tax cut as a tax increase by Obama. The way that they manipulate the public through the media is just uncanny. They are making the Bush tax policy appear as if it was a permanent law and the evil Democrats are going to radically change tax policy. Of course this is all BS. The tax policy was never permanent...which is why the legislation is sun shining to be reconsidered by Congress. The cuts were temporary. This misconception (that Republicans purposely created) has allowed them to frame the scheduled expiration as an increase. This has been another textbook example of the power & influence of Conservative right wing media.

Commentary on why the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire.

The Politics of Stupidity...or More Accurately, The Stupidity of Our Politics

E.J. Dionne posted a great commentary today on Truthdig.

The Politics of Stupidity Strikes Again

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?

Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example.

He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country’s deficit that alongside the cuts, he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine: a fiscal conservative who really is a fiscal conservative.

That could never happen here because the fairy tale of supply-side economics insists that taxes are always too high, especially on the rich.

This is why Democrats will be fools if they don’t try to turn the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year into an election issue. If Democrats go into a headlong retreat on this, they will have no standing to govern.

The simple truth is that the wealthy in the United States—the people who have made almost all the income gains in recent years—are undertaxed compared with everyone else.

Consider two reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One, issued last month, highlighted findings from the Congressional Budget Office showing that “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007,” the period for which figures are available.

The other, from February, used Internal Revenue Service data to show that the effective federal income tax rate for the 400 taxpayers with the very highest incomes declined by nearly half in just over a decade, even as their pre-tax incomes have grown five times larger.

The study found that the top 400 households “paid 16.6 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2007, down from 30 percent in 1995.” We are talking here about truly rich people: Using 2007 dollars, it took an adjusted gross income of at least $35 million to get into the top 400 in 1992, and $139 million in 2007.

Read the Full Commentary from Truthdig.

Kill the Bush tax cuts, stop rewarding the rich during the recession

In another display of stunning hypocrisy, congressional Republicans continue their fight to reward the rich during the recession. During the upcoming campaigns, Republicans will claim to represent every American, but that’s hardly the case when it comes to tax policy. This time the battle is over whether Congress should extend Bush’s 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and the GOP is siding with the rich over the middle-class.

Read the rest at The Loop.