GOP lying yet again about tax cuts
According to soothsayer Sarah Palin, if those deficit generating, George W. Bush tax cuts are permitted to expire at the end of the year, “This is going to result in the largest tax increase in U.S. history.” If you believe that, I can introduce you to a granny you can send to one of Palin’s nonexistent “death panels.”
The fact is Palin has decided to hatch another whopper the size of Mount Everest about something that just won’t happen.
President Obama never mentioned ending the tax cuts for everybody. Sarah Palin seems to think he did.
That’s the same ex-governor of Alaska who conjured healthcare “death panels” out of thin air.
This time, she told her Fox News co-worker Chris Wallace that allowing the tax cuts to expire is “idiotic.”
If that’s so “idiotic” then why did former presidential Director of the Office of Management and Budget – David Stockman – say something completely the opposite?
“If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing,” Stockman says.
In case you don’t quite remember him, Stockman was Ronald Reagan’s budget director. I think he knows a lot more about fiscal policy than a woman who sells wads of hyperbole for a living.
Palin is intentionally overlooking the fact that Obama will only end the tax cuts for individuals making more than $200,000 or couples making over $250,000.
Republicans are simply sounding the tax increase alarm to taint Obama, even though Obama has actually cut taxes since he’s taken office.
The $787 billion stimulus package contained $288 billion in tax relief.
Those lapsed tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers are a deficit-cutting measure that could send an estimated $678 billion dollars to the U.S. Treasury over the next 10 years.
That’s the kind of deficit cutting Republicans have been whining about for 18 months. That is, until the Democrats want to do it.
Now Republicans are talking about how the richest Americans need those tax cuts to inspire “job creation.”
Well, those wealthy Americans have had those tax cuts for the better part of a decade, where are all of those jobs? Bunk. Republicans only got religion about “job creation” after they’d repeatedly tried to block extended unemployment benefits and failed. Do they want to end unemployment – or the unemployed?
Oh, that doesn’t stop them from trying to sound like putting the country on a firm employment footing is their highest priority.
“This is the first time since the depression that unemployment has stayed above 9 percent for two consecutive years,” Minority Leader John Boehner told Chris Wallace.
Boehner is wrong. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was a 19-month period (between March of 1982 and September of 1983) when unemployment never dropped below 9 percent.
That was, by the way, during the presidency of supply-sider-in-chief Ronald Reagan.
So what is all of this about? Politics, of course. It’s always about politics for Republicans.
If Obama wants to do away with tax cuts for the rich, Republicans claim he wants to “raise” taxes on everybody. They have a Tea Party constituency that believes that kind of thing.
Americans pay a lower percentage of taxes compared to the gross domestic product than most of the developed countries on earth. But Republicans want you to believe you’re being overtaxed, and the money is being spent needlessly.
William Gale, the co-director of the Tax Policy Center told CBS News, “The relation between what is said in the tax debate and what is true about tax policy is often quite tenuous.”
Gale finds the rise of the Tea Party, when taxes have actually been lowered, “is really hard to understand.”
I understand it.
Rightwing media (that now includes Sarah Palin) and Republicans see there’re points to be made, and votes to be gathered by sticking to that old line that Democrats want to tax us all to death.
The truth, then, gets pushed aside.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.