You can’t be serious with this post. This is my favorite quote:
“So far there has been nothing more than ideas floated about higher payroll taxes, limits on charitable deductions, phaseouts for other deductions, limitation of home mortgage interest deduction (which I think would be a very good thing for real estate). No bills even in committee.”
I’m an attorney who works on tax issues all day, and carefully follow tax policy, and if the liberal party leaders/Obama do what they say, we’ll have a boat load of new taxes and regulation, whether cap and tax, higher CG taxes, deduction caps, adjusted phaseouts, etc. The AMT comment was to show the myopic examination of the impact of federal taxes on high-income earners in your article. Simply not an apples to apples comparison, by any stretch.
And if you think the blue dog Democrats will fight Obama and Democrat party leaders, perhaps. However, they’ll vote for enough of these to undercut the US economy at its weakest period in decades as witnessed with cap and trade.
As a die-hard party supporter, if you think this is the road to revive the US economy, best of luck in the mid-terms.
In fact, if I were trying, I couldn’t design a better plan to kill the Democrat’s electoral prospects in 2010. How quickly the Democrats have forgotten their mantra; it’s the economy stupid. These taxes and new regulations will be a rapid poison going through the system. Job creation in this environment? No chance.[/quote]
I’m not kidding at all. And we’re in the same business. (though I’m mostly retired from that now.)
How many of them have come up for a vote in committee? How many have come up for a vote in either house? How many specific recommendations for raising taxes have come from the white house? Not ideas floated, but specific recommendations.(you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, we both know the answers.) Same with the silly predictions of confiscating guns and rounding up people in internment camps. Fear tactics without basis in reality.
I am not a die hard party supporter. Not by a long shot. But I also don’t buy the crap about lowering taxes strengthen the economy. There is simply no empirical evidence that it’s true. If anything it’s the opposite. It didn’t work for Reagan. Tax receipts went DOWN significantly after ERTA, TEFRA recovered about 1/3 of those losses and the other 7 were insignificant changes. And it didn’t work for Bush II. Nor is there any evidence that all higher taxes stifles the economy. Or that marginal taxes above a certain rate creates a disinsentive to work. No matter how hard the GOP clings to it, supply side economics is simply a failed economic theory. (Check the records, the stock market has done considerably better under democratic administrations than they have under republican administrations.)
The Dems may screw up for 2010. But it won’t be because of a health care bill. And it won’t be taxes. It’s more likely to be arrogance. And whatever it is, in order for the GOP to advance at all, it will have to be a massive screw up. Because the GOP has screwed the pooch so badly since the election, it’s base keeps shrinking. Just when I think it can’t get any worse, it does. The Sotomayor hearings are just the latest. (and as I said before, I don’t think that is a good thing.)
