The mythological “fiscal cliff”, the new Red Menace, the Islamo-fascist terrorist hiding under your bed, has done it’s work. Obama has been “forced” to cave in and is reportedly working a deal out that conspiracy theorists like me said was going to be the end result all along. And the “liberal” pundits just can’t seem to understand why.
The discouraging thing about the “fiscal cliff” negotiations is not that they have gone into the eleventh hour, or that they may go into the new year, or even that they won’t resolve the long-term budget deficit. It’s that President Obama has retreated on his hard line on taxes. In the months before the election, and in the weeks after his victory, Obama had a clear position: The Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 were ending. He would not sign any extension, and if Republicans refused to extend tax cuts for income below that level, he would hold them responsible for it until they did.
Now, by all accounts, Obama is prepared to extend the Bush tax cuts up to $400,000 a year. Or maybe more. As of Friday, Obama had told Republicans they could have the tax cuts extended on income up to $400,000 if they would accept the estate tax rising from its Bush-set rates. As of last night, Democrats were conceding the estate tax plus the higher exemption on tax rates, which had risen to $450,000. And Republicans still hadn’t agreed to it! Why would they, when Democrats keep hurling money at them? By midnight, Republicans might be getting the Saturday Night Live version of Obama’s offer (“a 1% raise on the top two Americans — just two people”). Jonathan Chait
Oh gee! I wonder why our CHANGE president who has done nothing but pack his cabinet with corporate CEOs and billionaires since day one would possibly fold up his affected populous stand and give in to the billionaires and corporate CEOs that he hangs out with and vacations with and rubs elbows with on a daily basis? I just don’t understand it all…
Over at HuffPuff, they seem to have the skinny on how much to give away to the wealthy, but they don’t really have a grasp on how much they are going to hurt the poor. That’s because the Great One and the fake left haven’t quite hashed out how much they are going to bleed us quite yet…
Left unaddressed, at the moment, are the $1.2 trillion in sequestration-related cuts that will be triggered on Jan. 1. The parties are arguing over how long to stave off the cuts, and whether and how to offset them. HuffPuff
If you are having difficulty understanding what that means, it means poor people programs who can’t afford to hire expensive lawyers to give bribes campaign donations to the people in congress and Barack Obama.
“Discretionary domestic spending” refers to “government programs for poor and vulnerable citizens” HufPuff Nov 2012
The Bush tax cuts will be extended forever for up to $450,000 a year…
Related:
President Obama on Monday said a deal to avoid the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ – a combination of automatic tax increases and spending cuts – was “within reach,” although not yet done, but the uncertainty has prompted cries of potential doom for military spending.
As part of the sequestration deal, the set of budget laws last year that imposed large, automatic spending cuts if an agreement to balance the budget couldn’t be reached by Congress, the Pentagon is set to endure $500 billion in budget cuts over the next ten years.
On Monday, the Pentagon issued a statement warning that a failure to avoid the cuts would put the jobs of 800,000 civilian employees at risk.
But the proposed cuts to defense budgets are, frankly, puny. The harshest scenario for defense cuts would only put budgets back at about the 2007 level, and they aren’t even really “cuts” to defense spending; they are reductions in the rate of growth of defense spending.
Either way, the budget for military empire and wars will grow…
http://news.antiwar.com/2012/12/31/fiscal-cliff-still-leaves-pentagon-sitting-pretty/
Speak Your Mind