Obama Tax Cuts Rejected In House

Did you know that Obama offered to make BushTaxCuts 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 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 $1Trillion in revenues in return for $3Trillion of spending cuts would've taken the expiration of the BushTaxCut­s off the table. That'd 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 the most leverage.

IOW: 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 - 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.

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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost