The Nation:Tax Cuts Forever? by Christopher Hayes

[applegrove]

Tax Cuts Forever?
Christopher Hayes
December 9, 2010 |
This article appeared in the December 27, 2010 edition of The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/article/157016/tax-cuts-forever

".........................SNIP

The Republicans have spent two years—an entire election cycle and postelection victory lap—repeating with tourettic persistence dire warnings about the existential threat posed by large deficits and mounting government debt.

And yet, amazingly, these same Republicans (and a few conservative Democrats), who love to offer lectures about the necessity of shared sacrifice, also spent the week demanding that all the Bush tax cuts be made permanent, a policy that would increase the debt over the next ten years by an astounding $3.3 trillion. Occasionally, you would find politicians oscillating madly between these two positions in the same paragraph or media appearance, reaching its reductio ad absurdum with a blog post about Kent Conrad's views on the matter that George Stephanopoulos headlined: Sen. Conrad: Extend All Tax Cuts; Time to Get 'Serious' About Deficit.

This apparent contradiction makes sense only if you understand what has become so manifestly obvious that writing it out makes me bored and angry: conservatives do not care about deficits or the national debt. Nothing they have done over the past several decades—from the record deficits of the Reagan and Bush/DeLay years to their party-line opposition to nearly every legislative measure (public option healthcare reform, cap and trade) that would reduce the deficit—suggests otherwise. The great spokesman for the so-called fiscal hawks in the GOP caucus, Wisconsin's Paul Ryan, not only voted against the largely conservative recommendations of the president's deficit commission but in 2003 cast the deciding vote for Medicare Part D, a corporate giveaway and entitlement expansion that was unfunded and will, according to the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, add "$400 billion to the deficit in the first 10 years, and trillions more in the decades after that."

What Republicans do care about is defending the incomes of the country's wealthiest, distributing income upward and cutting taxes in order to make progressive governance impossible. Obama was right to say in his press conference that tax cuts for the rich are the Republicans' Holy Grail.

SNIP..................................."

http://www.thenation.com/article/157016/tax-cuts-forever

[MindandSoul]

1. YES!

[mmonk]

2. Chris nailed it in this line:

It's the standard bribery model of legislating that has come to characterize Washington in the era of oligarchy.

[provis99]

3. tax cuts now, tax cuts tomorrow, tax cuts forever!

Today's Republicans really channel George Wallace, don't they?

[pansypoo53219]

4. they are crack whores

for tax cuts. we need to have an intervention. this is CLASS WARFARE.