The tax debate

This past week has seen a rather interesting discussion occur within Washington, DC. President Obama announced an agreement on maintaining the current tax rates while at the same time as an extension of unemployment benefits with Senate Republicans. This has led Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Representative Peter DeFazio to state that the deal was unacceptable and therefore not likely to pass the House of Representatives during the current lame duck session. Representative DeFazio and others within the Democratic caucus are not the only ones who are not happy with the President’s agreement. Over the past few weeks, most Democratic lawmakers had used the term, “hostage takers” to describe the Republican position of maintaining all tax rates at their current levels rather than raising taxes on any American. Liberal blogers are up in arms with the agreement, vowing to delay and or defeat the agreement. So who is the “hostage taker” now? The Democrats have decided that they would rather raise taxes on every American that pays federal income taxes, rather than to allow a small portion of Americans to maintain their current tax levels. Do any of these folks remember what just happened in the election this past November? Republicans won on every level – picking up six Senate seats, sixty-three House seats, numerous Governor and state House seats. Do you think it was because all the Republican candidates were terrific candidates who were running against dimwitted Democratic lawmakers?

Does this seem crazy to anyone else? What this reaction seems to state, is that the liberals believe that everyone should see their taxes raised, rather than to see some stability in the tax code. Liberals believe that the original tax cuts, passed under former President Bush, unfairly were focused on the rich. What they seem to miss is that every single American who paid federal income taxes saw their taxes reduced under the Bush tax cuts. Democrats ran on the phrase, “tax cuts for the rich.” I guess their opinion was anyone with a job should be considered rich. Somehow, I know that most Americans disagree with this assessment.

In today’s economy, with the high unemployment rate and the uncertainty within the business community, not only on where the economy is going, but also with regard to the federal government’s involvement within the economy, many businesses are reluctant to add employees. Democrats now are also complaining that the business community has a large stockpile of cash sitting in their bank accounts and instead of adding employees or facilities. It just seems to me that unless liberal Democrats get exactly what they want, and only that, nothing is going to be good enough.

The mainstream media organizations keep talking now about the potential in-fighting within the Republican party and seems to ignore the huge disagreement within the Democratic party. Maybe they just see the fact that most moderate Democrats lost this past November and the only elected Democrats on the national level seem to represent either the inner cities, or either coasts. Whatever happens, if the lame duck Congress does not pass the agreement between President Obama and the Republicans in Congress, every single American will see an increase in their federal taxes starting January 1, 2011 and any belief that the US economy would improve over the course of the next few years would be eliminated. Yeah, Charles Krauthamer might be right in that this agreement is a second stimulus that will only help President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, but hopefully that means that the unemployment rate is closer to 7% as opposed to the current 9.8%.