Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (46224)	9/27/2010 10:06:10 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The Tax Hikes Cometh Grab your wallet. BY Matthew Continetti October 4, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 03 Let’s examine what the 111th Congress has accomplished so far. There was a $1 trillion stimulus bill that failed to jumpstart the economy. There was a $1 trillion health care overhaul that the public did not want. There was a financial bill that gave huge amounts of power to unelected regulators. And now, for their final trick, the Democrats who run Congress have decided to leave Washington without doing anything to prevent the largest tax increase in history. God only knows what they are planning for an encore. In a little more than 90 days, taxes on incomes, capital gains, dividends, and estates are going to rise. Not just for some families. For every family. And the Democrats haven’t lifted a finger to stop it. They haven’t even written a bill. They have not found the time, in the twenty months they’ve controlled Congress, ever actually to try to block the tax hikes. It’s amazing: The Democrats have no problem passing unpopular legislation. But when they are charged with doing something that the public actually wants, such as preventing the coming tax hike, they turn to jelly. How did it come to this? President Obama wants to limit any tax increase to families making more than $250,000 a year. Republicans, along with many Democrats, say that raising taxes on anyone during a weak recovery is a horrible idea. Instead, this group suggests, why not extend current tax rates for another two years? After all, a bill to that effect could easily pass both houses of Congress. But it’s not going to happen. The chances for a compromise are nil, at least until after the election. It’s a decision that reveals the depth of the Democrats’ ideological commitment. One of the president’s favorite lines during the tax debate has been that Republicans are holding tax cuts for the middle class “hostage” to tax cuts for the rich. But events have proven that it’s the Democratic leadership and Obama who are holding taxpayers hostage. It’s the Democratic leadership and Obama who would rather have taxes rise on everyone than extend current tax rates for everyone including the wealthy. This obsessive focus on income redistribution has divided the Democrats and left them in the grip of a political panic. One reason no bill has been brought to a vote is the leadership is afraid they’d lose. They don’t want to be exposed as weak in the run-up to Election Day. Or, if they did win the vote, then Democrats would have supported higher taxes on small businesses. And since that’s not exactly a campaign winner, the Democrats have punted. Notice how the actual, real-life, day-to-day economic fortunes of 300 million Americans do not figure in the Democrats’ philosophical and partisan calculations. Such is the tenor of government in the Obama presidency. Four years ago, remember, the Democrats pledged that they would govern differently from the corrupt and big-spending Republican Congress. It was an oath that President Obama broadened and deepened in 2008, when he spoke of bridging the divide between red and blue America and changing the culture of Washington. Americans took the Democrats at their word, entrusting them with power in 2006 and 2008. What Americans didn’t realize at the time was that they were also emboldening an arrogant, belligerent liberalism. It’s a liberalism that believes all answers to political questions have been scientifically decided, in the liberals’ favor. Americans not only were handing the reins of government to a political party. They were handing those reins to a theory about how social and economic policy ought to work. The theory gave us the stimulus, Obama-care, and (in the House) cap and trade. The theory says you can raise taxes on high earners without damaging the economy. But the theory hasn’t produced the desired results. And the theory has no answers for Americans who support limited government. What’s the legacy of the 111th Congress? The economy remains weak. Government has grown larger and is no more effective. So more lobbyists than ever are feeding at the trough. Corruption still exists. Trust in institutions keeps falling. Congress can’t pass a budget, and it can’t prevent a tax increase. Democrats explain their failure by blaming Republican opposition or lamenting the filibuster. But these are sideshows. There always will be partisan disagreement, and Democrats will soon love the filibuster again. No, the reason Democrats have failed is that big-government liberalism has been exposed, over and over, as an inadequate response to the challenges of our times. Need evidence? Look no further than the great Democratic tax dodge of 2010. —Matthew Continetti weeklystandard.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (46224)	9/27/2010 11:03:45 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

The Seduction of the Tea Partiers September 26, 2010 By ROSS DOUTHAT nytimes.com On the surface, the Pledge to America that House Republicans unveiled last week, in obvious imitation of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America, feels like a triumph for the Tea Party. Whereas the Gingrich-era contract was a terse, 865-word list of legislative priorities, the 2010 pledge reads like an expansive, even radical manifesto. It runs to almost 8,000 words, bristles with charts and graphs and inspiring quotations, and includes a lengthy preamble modeled on the Declaration of Independence. And whereas the original contract’s language was carefully poll-tested to appeal to squishy moderates, the pledge has the aggressively small-government tone of a Rand Paul stump speech, complete with attacks on “self-appointed elites,” praise for Americans’ speaking out “in town halls and on public squares,” and pledges “to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers.” But style can be deceiving. House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the Tea Party movement, but they’ve evaded its most admirable substance. The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude. The Tea Partiers have a point. Officially, the Republican Party stands for low taxes and limited government. But save during the gridlocked 1990s, Republican majorities and Republican presidents have tended to pass tax cuts while putting off spending cuts till a tomorrow that never comes. Conservatives have justified this failure with two incompatible theories. One is the “starve the beast” conceit, which holds that cutting taxes will force government spending downward. The other is the happy idea that tax cuts actually increase government revenue, making deficit anxieties irrelevant. The real world hasn’t been kind to either notion. Cutting taxes without cutting spending, the Cato Institute’s William Niskanen has shown, may make voters more likely to support big government, because spending feels like a free lunch. And while some tax cuts can raise government revenue, the income-tax cuts of the Bush years emphatically did not. To their credit, the House Republicans don’t invoke starve-the-beast in their 2010 pledge, or pretend that renewing the Bush tax cuts would single-handedly push the nation into the black. But their fiscal vision practices the same kind of free-lunchism that the Tea Party supposedly abhors: it promotes low taxes without coming close to identifying the spending cuts required to pay for them. There’s a sound political rationale for this, of course. Reducing spending is always difficult, and a Republican Party coasting toward a midterm victory has little incentive to stake out controversial positions. And as everybody knows, the only way to really bring the budget into balance is to reform (i.e., cut) Medicare and Social Security, a topic that nobody in Congress — save the indefatigable Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan — is particularly eager to touch. But that means that the pledge is ultimately less about the triumph of the Tea Partiers, and more about their potential co-option by Republican politics as usual. That would be unfortunate. Their eccentric elements notwithstanding, the Tea Parties have something vital to offer the country: a vocal, activist constituency for spending cuts at a time when politicians desperately need to have their spines stiffened on the issue. But it’s all too easy to imagine the movement (which, after all, includes a lot of Social Security and Medicare recipients!) being seduced with rhetorical nods to the Constitution, and general promises of spending discipline that never get specific. It wouldn’t be the first time a mass protest movement won a rhetorical victory without achieving a lasting policy shift. The antiwar movement, for instance, seemed to effectively take over the Democratic Party in the middle years of the Bush administration. But here we are, two years into a Democratic presidency, and Gitmo is still open, the U.S. is still in Iraq, and Barack Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan. Whether the Tea Party’s zeal for limiting government meets a similar fate may depend on the class of Republicans elected in November. From Sharron Angle in Nevada to Joe Miller in Alaska to Marco Rubio in Florida, many of the party’s insurgent candidates have gone further than the Republican leadership in acknowledging the painful necessity of entitlement cuts — and it hasn’t yet cost them their chances at high office. Democrats are eager to paint these candidates as dangerously extreme. But on the evidence of last week’s pledge, a little more extremism in the defense of fiscal responsibility is exactly what the Republican Party needs.