The economy is surprisingly simple. If business and the rich won't spend, and the middle class can't spend, the only factor left, to keep pushing money into the insatiable maw of capitalism, is the government. So, for the sake of the US economy, should the government give the money to the rich who either sit on it (or invest it in another part of the world, like China), or give the money to the not rich, who spend it? Apparently this President does not know the answer to that simple question, even though he has his own Council of Economic Advisers.
Mr. President, for these meager and short-lived crumbs you've gotten, for some of the unemployed, you have given up huge, costly, insulting, divisive, destructive tax cuts for the rich; and you have given in to Republican blackmail -- which will of course be followed by still more Republican blackmail.
And of course it's not just tax cuts for the rich that you've given up. There is also your new temporary payroll tax holiday, establishing a precedent that the way money is pumped into Social Security should be negotiated and traded off, thereby making it just that much easier to gut Social Security later.
And, oh by the way, in the middle of a crisis over making temporary Republican tax cuts permanent, you gave the Republicans another temporary Republican tax cut that they can come back later to blackmail you into making permanent. Well, sir, at least that's the end of it. Except, of course, for the estate tax -- what Republicans so happily call "the death tax," which will be reduced from its 2009 levels.
Huh?
The money given by one dead rich person to some living rich persons will not be taxed up to five million dollars. More than five million and it will be taxed at the 35 percent rate, which is less than it was under the tax laws of President Bush's last fiscal year! Sir, you have given undeserved tax breaks to rich people, living and dead, and you have carved them a little more deeply into the stone of law. And you want me to tell them which Democrat proposed this estate tax giveaway part?
Blanche Lincoln! Blanche Lincoln, repudiated by nearly half the Arkansans in her own party, and then repudiated by 63 percent of the voters in Arkansas. Mr. President, you're listening to Blanche Lincoln?! What?!
This president negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history. It is too late now to go back and ask why the President, and why the wobbly Democratic leadership, whiffed on their chance to force John Boehner to put his money where his mouth was. In September, Boehner said if he had no other option, and that of course he would vote to extend tax breaks only for the middle class.
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