Top Earners Lose Cost of BMW If Bush Tax Cuts Expire

[bpr]

Sorry, should've put this in R&R...

Here's the link.

[oddlots]

Re: Top Earners Lose Cost of BMW If Bush Tax Cuts Expire

It's all bush's fault:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-0...line-baum.html

Travel back with me to the early, heady days of 2001, when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting a 10- year surplus of $5.6 trillion.
Phantom Surplus
That surplus was always written in invisible ink -- $4 trillion of it vanished in the first year. That didn’t stop then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan from promoting the Endless Surplus forecast. Never one to stick to his monetary metier, Greenspan put his stamp of approval on Bush’s proposed $1.35 trillion tax cut.
In order to enact a tax cut of that size with the Senate evenly divided, Congress used the reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority, not a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority.
If proposed legislation increases the federal deficit beyond the 10-year budget window, it is subject to a 60-vote point of order as provided by the Byrd Rule, named after the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. The rule was designed to prevent lawmakers from adding extraneous amendments to reconciliation bills.
Everyone knew or should have known that this was a temporary tax cut (wink, wink) designed to put pressure on future Congresses. After all, no lawmaker wants to run on a platform of: “Vote for me, I raised your taxes.”
Temporarily Permanent
“It’s the equivalent of taking out a variable-rate mortgage that is scheduled to increase after five years,” says Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. “You know the rate is going to go up.”
That’s how the law was written, de Rugy says. “By spending like drunken sailors, they almost guaranteed that tax cuts would be in jeopardy in the name of the deficit.”



Classic Grover Nyquist style politics.