“It would be inexcusable for Congress not to further extend this middle-class tax cut for the rest of the year” — Barack Hussein Obama, immediately prior to demonizing the Republicans for trying to extend the middle class payroll tax cut for the rest of the year over Democrat demands to do so for a ridiculous two months.
Let’s see.
Republicans in the House passed a payroll tax extension that provided a year of clarity for the American worker and business owner. And the thing decried as a “poison pill” by Democrats was a provision to speed approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which even the damn liberal
LABOR unions are demanding because it would add 22,000 jobs to our economy and 118,000 spin-off jobs:
Which gets us to his blues, or rather the 20,000 blue-collar construction jobs that would come with the pipeline, and the further 118,000 spin-off jobs. The unions—from the Teamsters, to the Plumbers and Pipefitters, to the Laborers—are out in force pushing for this giant job creator. “We can’t wait to get America building again,” blares a union-sponsored website in support of Keystone, poking at the president’s latest political rhetoric.
Keystone is more than just the administration’s latest headache. It’s the clear culmination of an Obama governing philosophy that has consistently put green priorities ahead of blue-collar workers, and that is now one of the biggest threats to his re-election. […]
The EPA has labored over an ozone rule (estimated job losses: 7.3 million), power plant rules (1.4 million), a boiler rule (789,000), a coal-ash rule (316,00), a cement rule (23,000), and greenhouse gas rules (even Joe Biden can’t count that high). The administration blew up Louisiana’s offshore deepwater drilling industry, insisted Detroit make cars nobody wants to buy and, just to stay consistent, is moving to clamp down on the country’s one booming industry: natural gas.
Those going the way of the dodo are utility workers, pipefitters, construction guys, coal miners, factory workers, truck drivers, electrical workers and machinists. Many of these are union Democrats who don’t care if their union bosses are publicly sticking with the president. They are pessimistic about the future and increasingly angry over the president’s attack on their work.
Basically, Obama has quietly (give that the mainstream media would never cover this) killed nine million American jobs. And counting.
Damn Republicans and their damn vile demand that Americans get more jobs rather than more socialist nanny state.
And shame on Republicans in particular for a) giving Obama the year-long payroll tax cut extension that initially demanded; b) creating not only thousands but tens of thousands of jobs; and c) helping labor unions. That’s what Obama and the Democrats are saying.
After doing their part, the Republican House stuck around. Because unlike the Democrats controlling the Senate, they’re not piles of putrid political slime.
Then – after the Republicans passed their bill (and ask yourself what would have happened in the media coverage if Speaker Boehner had at this point had decided to send the Republican Congress home) – the Democrats came along and passed a two month extension of the payroll tax cut. Payroll processors have stated that this “is logistically impossible to make the needed changes in tax software before the short-term extension expires.” They point out that there is “insufficient lead time” to institute changes prior to the February 29 deadline and that such a “shortened deadline could create ‘substantial problems, confusion and costs affecting a significant percentage of employers and employees.'”
After doing their part to screw up the known universe, Democrats immediately left Washington, essentially saying to Republicans, “We’re going to force you to do this on our terms with no negotiations.” And the press blessed this act of “bold leadership.”
In fact, even more than merely recess, the Democrats in the Senate abjectly refused to send any representatives to the conference committee that provides resolution to bills passed by the House and the Senate:
Silent Hill. Harry’s left. All is dark – Senate side. The House voted simultaneously on Tuesday to disagree with the Senate two-month extension legislation for the payroll-tax holiday and send both chambers’ versions to a conference committee to negotiate a final deal. House Speaker John A. Boehner immediately named his eight negotiators for the committee tasked with resolving the differences in the length of the tax holiday and unemployment benefits, offsets and reform provisions. The development led to a standoff between the Ohio Republican and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Mr. Reid refuses to name conferees unless the House passes his short-term bill. On Saturday, the Nevada Democrat sent the Senate home on vacation until Jan. 23. Mr. Reid’s objection means Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell can’t name Republican negotiators because it requires unanimous consent. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, also won’t name her representatives. “I don’t think we should go to conference,” the California Democrat said on Monday evening. “We’re not going to that place.”
They passed their version of the bill AFTER the House passed its version, and then Democrats just left. Lights out. Screw you, compromise. And screw you, American people, because this is all about politics and political posturing, and we Democrats have the media propaganda covering our every move.
To further pursue the Democrat intransigence to so much as get off their asses for a single second to DO SOMETHING, we can add Barry Hussein’s refusal to budge a nanometer:
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, phoned President Obama this morning and asked him to send members of his economic team to the Capitol to end the political stalemate and negotiate a path toward a one-year extension of the payroll tax credit. The president declined the offer.
“With Sen. Reid having declined to call his members back to Washington this week to join the House in negotiating a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, the speaker proposed that the president send members of his economic policy team up to Congress to find a way to accommodate the president’s full-year request,” a senior aide to the speaker said. “The speaker explained his concern that flaws in the Senate-passed bill will be unworkable for many small-business job creators. He reiterated that if their shared goal is a one-year bill, there is no reason an agreement cannot be reached before year’s end. The president declined the speaker’s offer.”
This is Obama at his finest: playing shrill and divisive hardball partisan politics with the American people hanging on the line. Obama doesn’t WANT action; he desperately NEEDS a hopelessly divided Congress so he can run against it and blame them for all of his numerous failures. And, of course, the press has his back.
With Republicans obviously willing to negotiate and Democrats screaming, “NO! NO! NO! And what’s more, you Republicans are OBSTRUCTIONIST!!!”
House Speaker John Boehner is saying – and I quote – “Let’s sit down and resolve our differences.” The nerve of the man to ask for something so “extremist” as that. The man ought to be hauled outside the Capitol Building and shot for daring to want to sit down and work things out when the Democrat politburo and the Democrat Dictator-in-Chief have decreed that no American may have a tax cut unless it be done according to their imperial decree.
And let’s not forget the fact that gridlock may very well be a good thing, given that the payroll tax cut extension is a direct rip-off from Social Security:
As we’ve pointed out previously, the 2-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax (from 6.2% to 4.2%) might give a short-term boost to the economy, but it contributes to Social Security’s long-term insolvency at a time when the retirement program is already paying out more in benefits than it is collecting in taxes. A one-year extension would drive up next year’s federal deficit by more than $100 billion.
Sorry your check bounced, Grandma. Just, you know, eat less or something. Maybe step down to dog food. Some of it is quite tasty, I’m sure.
And interestingly, the same rather liberal USA Today that pointed out the above also pointed out that Democrats are actually encouraging a different tax cut extension:
The payroll tax issue also raises the question of whether there’s any such thing as a temporary tax cut. At the end of next year, the unaffordable Bush tax cuts are set to expire. Extending the payroll tax cut would set a precedent and give ammunition to those who want another extension of the Bush cuts, adding as much as $5 trillion to deficits over the coming decade.
For the record, this “$5 trillion” figure USA Today pulled out is the TOTAL amount that ALL income classes receive from the Bush tax cut. See the numbers from the Joint Tax Committee I cited in a previous article:
A study by the Joint Tax Committee, using the same static methodology that I refer to in my opening paragraph, calculate that the government will lose $700 billion in revenue if the tax cuts for the top income brackets are extended. And that sounds bad. But they also conclude that the Bush tax cuts on the middle class will cost the Treasury $3 TRILLION over the same period. If we can’t afford $700 billion, then how on earth can we afford $3 trillion? And then you’ve got to ask how much the Treasury is losing by not taxing the poor first into the poorhouse, and then into the street? And how much more revenue could we collect if we then imposed a “street” tax?
And, in another article, I cited Brit Hume pointing out that:
“But the very language used in discussing these issues tells you something as well. In Washington, letting people keep more of their own money is considered a cost. As if all the money really belongs to the government in the first place in which what you get to keep is an expenditure.”
Which belies the fact that the language that a “tax cut” somehow “costs the government” amounts to the profoundly Marxist claim that the government owns both the worker and all the output from that worker. I hope we don’t go there.
Republicans like tax cuts for everybody; in fact, they LOVE them. This situation with the payroll tax cut is awkward for them because it was set up to “pay for” the Democrat-imposed Social Security which is already trillions of dollars in the red and which will necessarily go bankrupt without massive changes:
Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.
“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.”
We don’t hear more about this enormous number, Kotlikoff says, because politicians have chosen their language carefully to keep most of the problem off the books.
“Why are these guys thinking about balancing the budget?” he says. “They should try and think about our long-term fiscal problems.”
According to Kotlikoff, one of the biggest fiscal problems Congress should focus on is America’s obligation to make Social Security payments to future generations of the elderly.
“We’ve got 78 million baby boomers who are poised to collect, in about 15 to 20 years, about $40,000 per person. Multiply 78 million by $40,000 — you’re talking about more than $3 trillion a year just to give to a portion of the population,” he says. “That’s an enormous bill that’s overhanging our heads, and Congress isn’t focused on it.”
“We’ve consistently done too little too late, looked too short-term, said the future would take care of itself, we’ll deal with that tomorrow,” he says. “Well, guess what? You can’t keep putting off these problems.”
Did I mention that dog food is actually quite tasty, Grandma? Cat food aint bad either, if that’s the way you prefer to go. And Wal-Mart makes them almost cheap enough to afford a Barack Obama presidency. Almost. As long as you don’t need any medications or anything.
And notice the description: that we’ve consistently “done too little, too late,” and “looked too short-term.” And then consider what the Democrats are doing with their two-month SHORT-TERM extension. You know, the one that will place a huge burden on payroll processing as noted above.
After Speaker Boehner caved – because the dishonest media-Democrat propaganda machine had made any other move politically impossible – Boehner came out in defeat and said:
“All year, you’ve heard me talk about short-term extensions, short-term gimmicks and the consequences they have for our economy,” Boehner said. “When you look at this … it’s another short-term extension. This creates uncertainty for job creators. I used to run a small business; I know how this works, and kicking the can down the road for a couple of months does cause problems.”
He also said:
“Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing, and sometimes it’s politically difficult to do the right thing. But you know, when everybody called for a one-year extension of the payroll tax deduction, when everybody wanted a full year of extended unemployment benefits, we were here fighting for the right things. It may not have been politically the smartest thing in the world, but let me tell you what: I think our members waged a good fight.”
No. It’s not hard to do the right thing in America; it is IMPOSSIBLE to do the right thing in America. Because dishonesty and lies and corruption and incompetence and ignorance and the worst kind of political partisanship and the worst kind of media bias rules the day.
It’s about time, I suppose, that Republicans finally learn that lesson that defined the new Democrat Party more than forty years ago.
Getting back to our little problem dealing with “short-term” thinking as explained by Kotlikoff above, the $211 trillion Democrat-devised disaster with Social Security and Medicare is also part of the Democrats’ payroll tax extension jihad:
Democratic leaders on Wednesday said they are not interested in passing a standalone bill to delay scheduled Medicare reimbursement cuts for physicians, as some Republicans have suggested, The Hill reports. Instead, they urged House Republicans to pass a Senate-approved two-month extension of a payroll tax break that includes a two-month delay to the Medicare cuts (Bolton, The Hill, 12/21).
But you won’t hear any of that from the mainstream media. Because it is dishonest and biased.
The American mainstream media could go to North Korea tonight and start writing for the communist dictatorship there and hardly even realize that they were in a different location. Such is their rigid party-line “journalism.”
I have watched the death of America being played out right before my eyes these past three miserable years.
If you don’t like rants, stop reading (maybe you should have already stopped reading, but better to warn you too late than not at all, right?):
The Republicans lost big on this. They didn’t lose because they didn’t have the facts and the legitimate principle on their side; they lost because of an avalanche of lies and because the American people have become a people hell bent on believing lies to their own destruction.
I think of pre-World War II Germany. Why did the most educate and “enlightened” people on earth at the time go so horribly wrong? I think of a journalist named Stephen Laurant had been jailed circa 1935 for questioning Nazism in search of the answer to that mystery. He wrote from his cell:
“I am writing this from cell 24. Outside a new Germany is being created. Many millions are rejoicing. Hitler is promising everyone precisely what they want. I think when they wake to their sobering senses, they will find they have been led by the nose and duped by lies.”
And there is no question that the German people WERE lied to. They were lied to terribly; they were lied to by their corrupt and dishonest media propaganda that they trusted as “news,” and all the while their leader was driving them deeper and deeper into a sea of lies into which they would ultimately drown as a people and as a culture.
And yet the German people were responsible for all of the above. Entirely responsible. Ten percent of the German population was wiped out. And they deserved to be wiped out. Because they chose to believe lies. It is only a bad people that chooses to dive into lies.
There comes a point when a culture becomes so toxic that it believes lies rather than the truth. The Germans reached that point.
Sadly, I believe America has reached that point, too. Or is terrifyingly close to it.
The Republicans (both political and establishment) who kept demanding that John Boehner cut a deal openly acknowledged that they weren’t speaking from principle, but rather from cold political calculus – and from the naked realization that the American people are clearly more in tune with lies than they are with the facts.
One one side there are lies and genuine evil. The Democrat Party has been the party of genuine moral evil in America since at least 1968. I believe you can look at the ugliness and violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and bookend it with the ugliness and violence of the Occupy Movement to see a party bent on attaining hell in America. On the Republican side there is far more timidity and fear than there is courage and conviction.
As a postscript, I add the fact that Obama has lost the war in Iraq in a single day that our American warriors fought at great cost to win. Obama had three years to negotiate U.S. troop status in Iraq and refused to do so. John McCain rightly said that We could have remained in Iraq and provided the security and backstopping that the country we fought so hard for desperately needed; but we didn’t because Barack Obama didn’t want to stay. And now – IMMEDIATELY following our precipitous withdrawal that General Keane correctly labeled “an absolute disaster”( before going on to say that “”We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace”) – Iraq is now in a state of complete chaos as Shiite President Maliki waited until we left to attack his Sunni Vice President and al Qaeda waited until we left to leave bombs that murdered at least 63 and wounded at least 194 Iraqis. The country we gave so much blood and treasure for is going to fall right into Iran’s hands. And it couldn’t be more Barack Obama’s fault. General Keane also said:
“The United States in moving away from Maliki almost three years ago was a huge strategic mistake on our part. And we have been suffering the consequences of that ever since. And certainly the troop pull-out just added to that catastrophe.”
That is ALL on Obama. As Iraq degenerates into chaos and Iranian dominion following Obama’s cowardly cut-and-run, remember that the Obama administration once acknowledged that Iraq was handed to them as a victory in their boast that, “this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” What Bush gave following years of hard-fought war as a victory, Obama pissed away in defeat in order to obtain his naked political agenda of appeasing his leftwing base.
Not that the mainstream media will ever report that fact.
Remember, this is God damn America. And God will give us what we deserve. Because this is a nation defined by lies and stupid politically self-serving policies that will ultimately guarantee our collapse and destruction.
Start Thinking Right 