Tag: Bush Tax Cuts
WITH A HANDFUL of exceptions, every Republican member of Congress has signed a pledge against increasing taxes. Would allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled in 2012 violate this vow? We posed this question to Grover Norquist, its author and enforcer,and his answer was both surprising and encouraging: No.
Of course, letting the tax cuts expire is decidedly not Mr. Norquist’s preference. Indeed, as a matter of policy, he is passionately opposed to a single dime in new tax revenue. But the fact that Mr. Norquist interprets his own pledge to permit such conduct suggests that Republican lawmakers who have been browbeaten into abjuring any tax increase, at any time, for any reason, may not be as boxed in as they believe. The official Republican line has been that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, even for those earning more than $250,000, would be a job-killing tax increase. The fact that the godfather of the pledge does not interpret the lapse as an increase is significant.
President Obama wants to end the George W. Bush tax cuts for the wealthy when they expire this year, aides said today.
“He will not support extension of the upper income Bush tax cuts,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
“He could not be more clear,” Carney added.
The comments came as former president Bill Clinton and others suggest that a temporary extension of all the Bush tax cuts may be necessary so that Congress can work out a long-term deal to reduce the federal debt.
The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year, but no action is expected before the Nov. 6 election.
No matter how they try to distort the truth, one thing’s for sure – recorded facts will always remain the same (unless your name is Jon Kyl of Arizona, who unsuccessfully tried to change the record after lying about Planned Parenthood on the floor of the Senate). No, this post is not about Jon Kyl, but rather his Republican congressional lying buddy – Senator Jeff Sessions.
Yesterday on CBS’s Face The Nation, Sessions apparently forgot the power of records and stated that the Bush Tax cuts led to increased revenue for each year the taxes were cut. The way that lie unknowingly fell from Mr. Sessions’ mouth, was in response to a correct statement made by a Democrat on the panel, Mr. Bill Nelson. Nelson stated the facts, saying;
“Jeffrey, you have to acknowledge that part of our deficit problem was the huge Bush tax cuts in the early part of the decade. What was handed off to the new administration of over a trillion dollars of annual deficit, that accounted for almost half of it. If you’re going to be real about the numbers, you’re going to have to address these kinds of things.”
Jeffery must have thought he was on a Fox News program, where facts and records don’t matter. He responded to Mr. Nelson’s statement by saying;
“That’s not accurate, Bill. The revenue went up every single year after those tax cuts were put in. The revenue is down now because of the low economy … It’s not because taxes have been cut in recent years. It’s because people are not making money. They’re not paying as much taxes. So increasing taxes on that weakened economy is not the way to increase revenue. “
Oh Jeffery, when will you Republicans learn about the Google machine?
A quick search revealed the facts – according to the Bureau of Economic Data, and the White House Office of Management Data, it seems that what Mr. Sessions said, (brace yourself) was a lie. Here are the facts:
- In 2000, Before Bush took office, Tax Revenue came in at $2.0 Trillion
- In 2001, Tax revenue totaled – $1.9 Trillion
- In 2002, the first year of the Bush Tax Cuts went into effect, Tax revenue fell to $1.8 Trillion
- In 2003, tax revenue fell to $1.7 Trillion – This, after two more tax cuts went into effect over the next two years, revenue saw a 10% decline.
CBS reports the following;
Analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice claims that the Bush era tax cuts resulted in $1,918.9 trillion in lower revenue from FY2001 through FY2009, and that the total cost if implementing the cuts (including interest payments on debt) was $2,141 trillion.
But don’t let the facts get in the way of your lies Mr. Sessions, just keep doing what you do. We’ll keep fact-checking and using the Google machine to prove you wrong.
Tim Pawlenty came out with his economic proposal, a financial calamity that would make the Bush Tax cuts look as if it was proposed by former Representative and ultra liberal Alan Grayson. Some of the numbers in the Pawlenty plan are:
- Reducing the top individual income tax rate from 35% to 25%
- Reducing the top Corporate tax rate from 25% to 15%
- Completely eliminate capital gains taxes, taxes on dividends and interest, and the estate tax
- Having just two income tax brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent
These drastic steps by Pawlenty are supposed to reduce the federal deficit, but according to the Tax Policy Center, the Congressional Budget Office and the IRS, even if all Pawlenty’s figures add up, revenue generated would be just 13.6 percent of GDP from 2013-2021, and equals a tax cut of $11 trillion over the same time. In comparison, the Bush’s tax cuts were three times smaller than what Pawlenty is proposing.
To put things into perspective, the nice folks at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did their research and came up with the following chart.
There’s simply no other way to describe the Presidential hopeful.
In a speech given at the Family Leader Presidential Lecture Series in Pella, Iowa, Hermain wowed the conservative audience by complaining about President Obama, and telling the audience that the only bills a Herman Cain president will sign into law, will be three pages or less. The audience loved it.
CAIN: Engage the people. Don’t try to pass a 2,700 page bill — and even they didn’t read it! You and I didn’t have time to read it. We’re too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That’s why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. What does Herman Cain, President Cain talking about in this particular bill?
ThinkProgress made this observation.
Cain’s pledge received a raucous round of applause from the crowd, who didn’t seem to fully appreciate the implications of such a radical cut-off mark. The vast majority of substantive bills passed by Congress are longer than three pages. Under this bright-line rule, Cain wouldn’t have signed such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Social Security Act, or thePATRIOT Act. In fact, he wouldn’t have even been able to sign the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which ran 114 and 18 pages, respectively.
As president, Cain wouldn’t be able to sign any of the always-lengthy appropriations bills that keep the government running and the military funded. In fact, pretty much the only legislation that could squeak by under Cain’s three-page cut-off would be the simplest bills naming post offices and the like. But perhaps that’s exactly what Cain wants — to completely shutdown government by refusing to take any action that requires a prolonged attention span.
