AP Furious GOP Won’t Fall For Old Dem Trap
July 12th, 2011 From Mr. Obama’s lickspittle minions at the Associated Press:
Culture, hard lessons drive GOP’s anti-tax stand
By CHARLES BABINGTON – Associated Press
July 12, 2011
WASHINGTON (AP) — On the surface, it would seem like an opportune time for Congress to include targeted tax hikes as part of a cost-cutting package to reduce the huge federal deficit.
Federal taxes, as a share of the overall economy, are at their lowest levels since 1950. A return to the higher income tax rates of the Clinton presidency — when many Americans prospered, and calls for tax cuts were fairly muted — would wipe out most of the deficit. And congressional Democrats appear ready to make deep spending cuts, sought by Republicans, in exchange for a smaller level of tax increases.
Ironically, when we first saw this headline, we thought this was going to be an article about how the Republicans have finally learned "hard lessons" from being snookered by the Democrats in the past. But, no. Laughably, the AP is complaining that the GOP won’t fall for the Democrats’ promise to cut three dollars in spending for every dollar in tax increases.
Remember, this is supposed to be a news article, not an editorial.
Despite all that, most congressional Republicans have vowed not to raise taxes of any kind, complicating efforts to reach a bipartisan deal to reduce spending and prevent the United States from defaulting on its loans.
The AP is positively apoplectic that the Republicans are listening to the people who elected them instead of the news media, and refusing to raise taxes. Also, note how casually they slip in the lie that the government will default without the debt ceiling being raised.
This is how they lie to their benighted readers day in and day out.
The adamant stand puzzles many analysts. They say it’s almost self-defeating, blocking Republicans from accepting deals in which Democrats have made the biggest concessions.
Can anyone name any concessions that the Democrats have made? Even one?
"Republicans don’t know when to take ‘yes’ for an answer," said Bob Bixby of the bipartisan Concord Coalition, a leading advocate of balanced budgets. "They could have very, very favorable terms" in the current negotiations, he said, with Democrats yielding far more in spending cuts than Republicans would have to yield in tax hikes.
The Concord Coalition is the creation of Democrats and washed up RINOs ‘moderate Republicans.’ It has never seen a tax hike that it didn’t like.
The potency of the Republican Party’s anti-tax stance seems to have caught even a top GOP lawmaker, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, by surprise. He had to back away from suggestions that he might accept significant revenue hikes as part of a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan.
"There was never any agreement to allow tax rates to go up in any discussions I’ve ever had with the White House," Boehner said Monday.
This is another blatant lie from the AP. As Mr. Boehner himself says, there has never been any plan to raise taxes, so there was no need to "back away."
Key Republicans and others cite at least four key events that transformed the GOP from a party with a balanced approach to taxes and spending — Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both raised taxes, though many Republicans now ignore those facts — to a party that puts a no-net-tax-increase pledge above almost everything else…
As we have noted, Mr. Reagan made the mistake of believing the Democrats when they promised to cut $3 in spending for every $1 dollar in taxes. He still believed that there were some honorable people in the other party. He was not infallible.
George H.W. Bush’s most memorable campaign phrase in 1988 was "Read my lips: No new taxes!"
And from that moment on, the media and the rest of the Democrat Party made raising taxes their number one priority.
But in 1990, Bush faced a rising deficit and congressional Democrats who, like today, insisted on revenue increases to partly offset spending cuts. Bush’s advisers persuaded him to accept the deal. Hardcore conservatives howled, and Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid to Bill Clinton…
Once again a Republican President fell for the Democrat promise of $3 of spending cuts for every new dollar in taxes. And, just like with Mr. Reagan, the spending cuts never happened.
But not only did the Democrats (and their media minions) lie to Mr. Bush about cutting spending. They promised they would never use his breaking his word against him. Which of course they did, early and often.
In recent years, staunch conservatives have expanded their influence in the Republican electorate. "The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group," which is conservatives, writes political analyst Nate Silver…
If only that were so. (By the way, Mr. Silver is a former Daily Kos blogger. So he is naturally an authority on the Republican Party.)
Today’s Republican Party is so taxaphobic that hardly anyone blinks when Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell says, day after day, that the nation has a spending problem, not a taxing problem…
Again, this is supposed to be a news article. Not an editorial.
Mathematically, of course, that’s not necessarily true. A government can close a budget gap with tax hikes, spending cuts or some combination of the two. Liberal bloggers make this point more robustly than do most Democrats in Congress.
"No, McConnell, we have a revenue problem, not a spending problem," wrote a blogger named westcoastliberal at Rawstory.com. "If you and your GOP cohorts had not sought tax cuts as a remedy for every problem, we could be sitting pretty as a country right now."
It’s come to this. The AP is citing people who are posting from their parents’ basement, and calling it news.
The Republican Party’s anti-tax stand is aided by a public with conflicting wishes. Voters generally oppose large deficits, higher taxes and cuts in programs that benefit them, a painless but impossible combination…
There is no conflict in these positions. Most Americans feel like they are already over taxed and that the government spends too much. And that they should get something back in benefits for the ‘entitlement’ programs that they have paid into for all of our working lives.
That is not an impossible combination. And it is preposterous for a supposed news organization to claim it is.
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