So I get an email forwarded to me today breathlessly describing how Obama's set to enact the most humongous tax increase in history which will send everyone to the poorhouse where we'll all be converted to atheistic Muslims and be conditioned to cheer as the president rapes my daughters. Actually, those last few bits weren't explicitly stated, but if you read between the lines it's there. Totally.
So anyway, the email was mostly about this Commie black man stealing all the hard-working white folks' money. Which is, you know, the biggest issue facing white America nowadays since those nice Mexican drug lords have solved our illegal immigrant problem by gunning down all the migrant farm workers en mass along the border. The forwarded email is, of course demonstrably misleading. I was going to say demonstrably false, but it occurred to me that by some torturous logic individual words, taken out of any rational context, may well be considered vaguely true. So I'll settle for misleading. It saddens me that such assertions are forwarded without any critical thought given to the content by otherwise intelligent people, but I can't say it surprises me.
The 2001 Bush tax cuts were gifts to millionaires and multinational corporations that destroyed the billion dollar budget surpluses of the Clinton administration ($236 billion in 2000). Ironically, there was no great pent-up demand for these tax cuts, and some business interests even voiced concern over the effect such massive cuts would have on budget. Personally, I've never quite gotten the evangelical fervor that mandates the more taxes are cut, the more revenue the government receives. Common (and economic) sense dictates that there is a break-even point beyond which the returns diminish rapidly.
Those ill-advised tax breaks are expiring now because Congressional budgetary rules prohibit deficit spending beyond the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's 10-year budgetary projections. So the GOP controlling Congress in 2001 got around this by passing the cuts as a "temporary" measure, lasting only the length of the CBO's 10-year projection, effectively sacrificing fiscal responsibility in order to pander to their political base. If Congressional leaders in 2001--not to mention the Bush administration--had truly been concerned with the fiscal health of our nation, they would have passed these cuts with offsetting spending reductions and made them permanent. They chose not to, yet nobody seems to be questioning this action today.
THIS is why I hold the current crowd of born-again deficit hawks and supposedly fiscally-responsive teabaggers in contempt. Republicans in Congress are screaming about deficit reduction, yet they are insistent on expanding the single biggest contributor to said national debt. This, friends, it the ultimate in hypocrisy. This is not a talking point. This is not a political ax to grind. This is fiscal reality. The budget will not, cannot be balanced without eliminating politically motivated giveaways such as the 2011 tax cuts and Medicare Part D (with projected costs of $727.3 billion through 2018). What happened to the true fiscal conservatives? They're not in Washington, not in the Democratic party and certainly not in the GOP. Why am I not ripping on the Dems as hard? Because frankly, they're not campaigning as the fiscally responsible party with one hand while writing hot checks with the other. The fact that Republican leaders are ignoring and marginalizing Rep. Paul Ryan is proof of that the lip service they are paying to budgetary restraint is no more than that--lip service. I guarantee that if Republicans gain control of Congress and the White House in upcoming elections, in short order today's trillion-dollar deficits will look like chump change. Because, hey, we tried that already in 2001 and look where it got us.
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