by: John Hayward, Human Events
There are two schools
of thought about the fallout from the fiscal cliff deal, which will raise
political radiation levels during the coming debt ceiling and sequestration
battles. Even though it’s been strung out over a few months, it’s really
all part of one big apocalyptic nuclear exchange, and the first school of
thought says Democrats have already cooked off their biggest warhead: they got
the tax increases they crave, so they can no longer whine about how
insufficiently high taxes are the reason for Washington’s financial distress.
One proponent of this
theory is President Obama’s former Office of Management and Budget chief, Peter
Orszag, who says the President lost some
“bargaining power” by winning the first round of negotiations,
but leaving the debt ceiling issue to be settled later. ”It’s entirely
possible they’re going to win the week and lose the quarter,” he said of the
White House position.
But the more
depressing view of the fiscal cliff settlement is that Democrats have actually
established a beachhead for even more tax increases.
They’ll interpret the Republican cave on tax hikes for couples earning
over $450k as a confession of guilt on behalf of the Evil Rich, whose tax-cut
“party” somehow “caused” Washington’s budget shortfall during the Bush era.
Far from settling the question of high taxes, this “confession” will
merely invite a further Inquisition. And since logic and reason have long
since departed the stage – nobody with a functioning calculator can believe
that even the highest tax increases of Barack Obama’s fevered dreams would
“fix” more than 10 percent of the federal deficit – the emotional power of this
argument will make the public eager for further looting of the Evil Rich.
This political
battlespace is further shaped by the sad reality that nobody is
really talking about “fixing” the federal deficit anyway. All proposals
are for largely symbolic “cuts” of $2 trillion to $4 trillion in a ten-year
deficit that will most likely push $10 trillion. Buy into the rosiest of
scenarios, both for the 10-year deficit and all of these “deficit reduction”
plans, and you’re still talking about slowing the government’s accumulation of
debt to perhaps half of its current speed. That’s not terribly meaningful
when we’re already hurtling towards the real “fiscal cliff” at
300 miles per hour.
So it’s a symbolic
argument, not a realistic discussion of Washington’s fiscal health, and as The Hill reports,
Democrats are already salivating at the thought of pushing for even more tax
increases, rather than behaving as if the “tax” side of tax-and-spend
“solutions” has been settled:
Democrats say they want to raise as much as $1 trillion in new revenues
through tax reform later this year to balance Republican demands to slash
mandatory spending.
Democratic leaders have had little time to craft a new position for their
party since passing a tax deal Tuesday that will raise $620 billion in revenue
over the next ten years.
The emerging consensus, however, is that the next installment of deficit
reduction should reach $2 trillion and about half of it should come from higher
taxes.
A lot of this will
come from eliminating or capping deductions… a strategy the Democrats just
finished telling us wouldn’t meaningfully reduce the deficit, because
Republicans were proposing it as an alternative to rate increases. With
rate increases in hand, the Democrats are now ready to stop pretending that
deduction reforms can’t bring in more revenue… and they want those, too.
All as part of a $2 trillion deal that wouldn’t even fully eliminate the
next two years of madcap deficit spending.
And the new tax burden
would be yet another sucker punch to an already battered economy, reducing or
even eliminating the net gain in revenue to the Treasury. Tax
simplification is a great idea, but only in the context of reduced rates –
dramatic reform, rather than a thinly-disguised tax increase.
If this all goes
Democrats’ way, it will be a powerful (and expensive) lesson in the folly of
trying to win a political debate by granting the other side’s premises. Note
the Democrats never do that – they weren’t about to come away
from the fiscal cliff debate having conceded that out-of-control federal
spending is the cause of the debt crisis. It doesn’t matter that it would
have been a concession to reality. Modern politics is
animated by the refusal to make such concessions.
Source: Human Events Blog, Democrats have another Trillion
Dollars of Taxes Coming Your Way, by John Hayward, 1/7/13.
Comments:
Obama’s goals include moving to alternate energy, solar and
wind, that costs 5 times more than coal and nuclear. He also restricts oil and gas exploration on federal
land. This is the only thing we in the
U.S. have going for us. Global markets
don’ t need anything else we are capable of producing. Our taxes and
regulations don’t allow manufacturing to grow.
Imagine trying to pay our bills after our taxes and living costs have
doubled and our income has not doubled.
The extra trillion is being spent on things we don’t need,
but the global Marxists want us to have them. Our unnecessary expenses include federal land
seizures, Agenda 21 implementation grants, the build up of Homeland Security,
disastrous central planning implementation, military and bank funding foreign
aid and the destruction of our coal and hydro-electric plants. Inflation
from money printing will do enough damage to our fragile private economy. Some
will say that we deserve to be poor, because we elected a few too many wrong
people. I blame the elected officials
who allowed the federal government to expand way beyond its Constitutional
limits over the past 100 years.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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