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Where are the “Obama Tax Cuts?”
The lame duck session of Congress is shaping up to be dominated by the issue of what to do with the “Bush tax cuts” set to expire at the end of the year. Democrats want to extend the Bush tax cuts only for everyone making less than $250,000, but the Republicans are insisting that they extend the Bush tax cuts across the board. What seems to be completely missing from the discussion are any so-called “Obama tax cuts.”
On Google News, I found 3,568 stories containing the phrase “Bush tax cuts,” but only 35 containing the phrase “Obama tax cuts.”
Since the campaign, President Obama has been planning to leave the tax rate for people making less than $250,000 a year the same as it was under George W. Bush. This actually requires Obama to actively draft and sign an entirely new law preventing the mandated change in tax rates from taking place. Obama clearly thought this was good politics, good policy, or both. Yet, for some reason, the White House is, in effect, letting Bush take all the credit for Obama’s planned extension of these tax rates by allowing the ongoing debate to refer to them as the “Bush tax cuts.”
Why didn’t the White House draft up a new tax law, with a few minor changes, that permanently extended the current tax rate for people making less than $250,000, and label that the “Obama tax cut.” By making a few small modifications, they could even have slightly reduced some tax rates for the middle class. This would allow the White House to legitimately claim the “Obama tax cuts” are not just an extension of the “Bush tax cuts,” they are, in fact, better!
If the administration did that, we would be having a different debate right now. Instead if it being about what parts of the Bush tax cuts we should extend, it would a debate between Democrats, who wanted to put in place the Obama tax cuts, and Republicans, holding the Obama tax cuts hostage unless the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy were also included.
If Obama is going to sign a big deficit-expanding tax law, he should at least get the PR win of making sure the name “Obama” is directly followed by the phrase “tax cuts” in a few thousand new news reports, articles, and blog posts.
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5 Comments so far
Show AllWhy aren't the Democrats proposing to end all of the Bush tax cuts...period ?
The amount that working class Americans are saving with the Bush tax cuts is more than offset by the reduction of services those tax cuts have caused.
Anybody who still has a job in America can afford to pay the same income taxes they would have paid during the Clinton era and anybody who is not working won't be paying much, if any income taxes.
With so many unemployed Americans struggling, the one tax code change Obama needs to make pronto is to rescind the income tax that Raygun imposed on unemployment insurance recipients in 1986. A president who really stood for hope and change would have proposed that change on 1/21/09.
By extending the "Bush tax cuts" Obama is giving America's favorite cowgirl all the ammo she needs to beat Obama in 2012.
How about 1960 tax rates? In fact, tax the super rich at 99%. Or, as long as we are at war, tax them at 200% of their income. Then we'll see how long those wars last.
Maybe Obama is getting ready to resign, or change party affiliations.
The Fed's "Quantitative easing" EXPLAINED by cartoon:
http://www.realecontv.com/videos/central-banks/the-coming-financial-disaster-in-a-nutshell.html
"Why didn’t the White House draft up a new tax law, with a few minor changes, that permanently extended the current tax rate for people making less than $250,000, and label that the 'Obama tax cut.'"
Well, yes, let the current cuts expire on schedule without any action at all, then pass a new bill with middle class cuts. It is rather obvious, and the inevitable conclusion to all the pointless, needless machinations is that Obama is a closet Neocon elitist, a Chicago pol through and through. But that's been clear for some time now. The closet door is standing wide open, and the sight isn't pretty.