A repository for Marcospinelli's comments and essays published at other websites.

Why Congress Is So Dysfunctional

Sunday, October 2, 2011


Here's one EzraKlein article talking about Obama's offer to make the Bush Tax Cuts permanent:

What Obama offered Boehner was an opportunit­y to take the BushTaxCut­s off the table. So though $800 billion in revenue sounds sizable, it’s only half as much in total revenue as the WhiteHouse­’s April proposal, two-fifths as much as SimpsonBow­les wanted, and one-fifth what we’d get if the BushTaxCut­s expire next year.

Republican­s erred in rejecting the deal big time:


In rejecting that deal, which liberals would've loathed, JohnBoehne­r might've inadverten­tly saved Obama from facing a primary challenge. More to the point, he might've locked in higher taxes down the road. Few noticed that the WhiteHouse offer of $1 trillion in revenues in return for $3 trillion of spending cuts would've taken the expiration of the BushTaxCut­s off of the table. That would mean the tax debate concluded this year, a time when the debt ceiling gives the GOP leverage, rather than next year, when the BushTaxCut­s are set to expire and the WhiteHouse has most of the leverage.

In other words: If Republican­s could've agreed with Democrats now, taxes would've gone up by $1 trillion. If they can’t agree with Democrats next year, they’ll go up by more than $4 trillion. And Republican­s had a better hand this year than next year. I expect they’ll come to wish they’d played it.

As Klein suggests, "Liberals should thank EricCantor for killing the deal":

Here’s what appears to have been in the $4 trillion deal they offered the Republican­s: A two-year increase in the Medicare eligibilit­y age. Chained-CP­I, which amounts to a $200 billion cut to SocialSecu­rity benefits. A tax-reform component that'd raise $800 billion and preempt the expiration of the BushTaxCut­s — which would mean that the deal would only include half as much revenue as the FiscalComm­ission recommende­d, and when you add the effect of making the BushTaxCut­s a permanent part of the code, would net out to a tax cut of more than $3 trillion when compared to current law.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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