What is the point of having a Democratic president and Democratic majority in the Senate if they do as good a job of advancing the interests of the wealthy as the Republicans? The Americans who need to pay higher taxes to help lower our deficit are going to have the Bush era tax cuts extended for two more years, costing us billions in lost revenue. U.S. GDP: 14.256 Trillion U.S. National Debt: 13,820 Trillion Shame on you, Obama. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2010/12/obama_sells_out_the_left_a_rep.html
I guess we're also supposed to pretend that by kicking this issue down the road a couple of years, Obama will be ready to make the wealthy pay their fair share of tax burden. In case he hasn't been keeping score, the Republicans already have the House and the Democrats will have to defend twenty-one Senate seats (!) in 2012. They're only a hair from taking control of both houses and possibly winning the White House in two years. Good luck.
He didn't cave..he's OWNED by Wall Street just like the republicans. They just pretend to be opponents while they work together to fuck over you.
Obama is a pragmatist, time is running out and he realizes that this is the best his administration could get done with Republicans now a majority in the House. This is a complex issue with many sides (see below). It is easy, but not accurate, to say that Obama caved on this isssue, politics is all about pick your poison. National Association of Manufacturers cites CBO support for job creation powers of full Bush tax cut extension Share this story: The National Association of Manufacturers says fully extending the Bush tax cuts will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. On Dec. 2, 2010, the business group issued a statement to show its support for extending all the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire on Jan. 1. Jay Timmons, the group's executive vice president, said that "manufacturers strongly support extending the 2001 and 2003 tax rates for all taxpayers. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, fully extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would add between 600,000 and 1.4 million jobs in 2011 and between 900,000 and 2.7 million jobs in 2012." We wondered whether the CBO, an independent group that estimates the cost and impact of legislation, really found that a full extension of the tax cuts would be such a job-creating engine. So we tracked down the original CBO analysis. The estimates come from written testimony by CBO director Douglas W. Elmendorf before the Senate Budget Committee on Sept. 28, 2010. Strictly speaking, the trade group has reported the numbers correctly. For 2011, the CBO did indeed estimate that full extension of the tax cuts on a permanent basis would create 600,000 to 1.4 million jobs, plus an addiional 900,000 to 2.7 million jobs in 2012. However, a couple of caveats are in order. What are the alternative scenarios? The way the group phrased its statement, you might think that the only alternative to its preferred option would be to let all the tax cuts expire. But the CBO ran the numbers under three other options -- a permanent partial extension (that is, a permanent cut for all but the wealthiest taxpayers, as Obama and many congressional Democrats favor) as well as a two-year extension for all taxpayers and a two-year extension for all but the wealthiest taxpayers. The option favored by the manufacturers and most Republicans -- full, permanent extension -- does produce the most jobs. But the Democratic option isn't far behind. In 2011, the permanent partial extension sought by Democrats would generate between 500,000 and 1.2 million jobs, which is about 100,000 to 200,000 fewer jobs (or 14 to 17 percent less) than the Republican option would generate. The picture is similar for 2012. Meanwhile, both of the options for a temporary extension -- for all taxpayers, or for all but the wealthiest -- would produce fewer jobs than either of the previous two options, according to CBO. Based on these estimates, you might say that the CBO data points to the GOP option as clearly the best, since it creates more jobs than any of the other alternatives. But it's more complicated than that. This brings us to the second bit of missing context. What happens after 2012? CBO found that the economic benefits from a permanent repeal for all taxpayers are higher in the first two years, but that policy comes with troublesome side effects after that. In his testimony, Elmendorf argued that without other tax hikes or deep spending cuts, a permanent extension of the tax cuts would balloon the deficit to unsustainable levels. That's especially true if Congress extends the tax cuts for all tax brackets. "A permanent extension of all of those tax cuts without future increases in taxes or reductions in federal spending would roughly double the projected budget deficit in 2020; a permanent extension of those cuts except for certain provisions that would apply only to high-income taxpayers would increase the budget deficit by roughly three-quarters to four-fifths as much," Elmendorf testified. "As a result, if policymakers then wanted to balance the budget in 2020, the required increases in taxes or reductions in spending would amount to a substantial share of the budget—and without significant changes of that sort, federal debt would be on an unsustainable path that would ultimately reduce income. ... Compared with the options examined here for extending the expiring tax cuts, various other options for temporarily reducing taxes or increasing government spending would provide a bigger boost to the economy per dollar of cost to the federal government." When we contacted the NAM, Erin Streeter, the vice president for communications, said, "With an unemployment rate that remains historically high, today’s number edging up to 9.8 percent, we believe the best way forward is job creation. The more jobs we can create, the more economic growth we will see across the nation." But she didn't push back on the substance of our analysis. So NAM is accurately quoting the numbers on the Republican alternative but conveniently leaving out the detail that the Democratic alternative is nearly as good at creating jobs. It also ignores the CBO's conclusion that extending the tax breaks for upper-income Americans offers diminishing returns. On balance, we rate the statement Half True.
The real test will be 2012, when he's running for re-election. Should he win re-election (and decent chance he will), then the tax cuts run out for the wealthy, he can make like Bill Clinton and follow the Third Way philosophy in some cases and then mesh it with his own economic philosophy that he promised, the economy could get some steam from that point on.
Obama is not a pragmatist. We have a huge deficit that has not been taken care of. He wants to kick it down for the next generation to handle. You don't run the country for here and now. You run it for tomorrow and this wasn't that move. Now the deficit will increase and make it harder to pay off. That's not pragmatic. That's irresponsibility.:smt009
I see your point but I disagree, see below. Many economists, including the CBO believe that we will not be able to address the deficit and debt via tax increases until we finally shake of the lingering effects of this vast recession (i.e. unemployment is back to post 2007 levels and GDP is increasing at a faster rate than it has the last 3 years). Obama has stated on multiple occasions, followed up by proposed policies I might add, that reducing the deficit and debt are priorities. This was a shrewd and pragmatic move to continue to give the economy time to recover while still giving himself the opportunity to address the situation in 2012, not irresponsible at all. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101207/ap_on_bi_ge/us_obama
It is irresponsible when you let your debt increase. I understand why he did it. He wants to stay in office but it is going to be costly. From my generation's point of view, we will be given a bigger debt than what we would have had he held ground. It is selfish maneuver.
I would agree if he did not have a plan to address it down the line, the stimulus packages, bailout money, and now the compromise on tax cuts were all necessary evils that increased the debt, but quite literally brought us back from the brink of Depression 2.0. There is a great book called "In Fed We Trust" that sheds great light on how close we were as a country to economic catastrophe. If he does not move to address the deficit and debt concerns in the next 2 to hopefully 6 years then I will agree with you on this.
I know this, I'm in the 28% tax bracket...and I can tell you without a doubt I didn't pay anywhere NEAR 28%...closer to 10%... ...and if I can do that with the small pieces of real-estate I have why do people think the wealthy pay the tax bracket they are in to begin with? Its joke. Unemployment should expire OR we find ways to cut spending elsewhere. This is the first time in American history we have had a war...and taxes did not go up, in short....a war we have not paid for. Obama all but hastened the already speedy decline of the United States of America. First....remove the countries ability to produce, then borrow so much money that the country can not reply it.
Ymra, Obama actually LOWERED taxes on business to give them a chance to grow and produce. Secondly he was only responsible for the second stimulus which if you have been paying attention is working, it saved jobs and the bailouts are being paid back with interest. It is unbelievable to me that people don't understand that it took over a decade of hubris, greed and wall street avarice to create the economic mess we are in now, and yet the average citizen expects Obama to fix it all in less than two years. starting at the 4:00 mark shows the average American understanding of politics. [YOUTUBE]zbyFeFhUTmI[/YOUTUBE]
