Progressive Tax Cut Extension Deal Reached?
The extension of the payroll tax cut through the end of 2012, will indeed contain another extension of the “emergency unemployment benefits, and the so-called medicare “doc fix payments,” according to a very sketchy article over at The Hill.com. This supposed “deal” contradicts Speaker Boehner’s earlier claims that House Republicans would put forward a clean tax cut extension bill that did not contain the Greek-style social welfare legislative policies that continue to add to the nation’s debt. Speaker Boehner wanted to call Harry Reid’s bluff in passing a clean tax cut extension bill, but apparently the current crop of House Republicans still refuse to even attempt to get government spending under control, as can be seen by the currently reported “deal.”
A few details of the tax cut extension that have been released:
The text of the bill has not been made available for public viewing as promised, yet lawmakers are alluding to voting on it on Friday anyway. That promise to the people to allow them to read the bills before they are passed has been broken several times by the Republican-led House, as can be seen here, and here. Barack Obama has also made a similar promise to allow the public to read the bills before passing them, which he too has also broken repeatedly. Remember the ludicrous statement that then Speaker Pelosi made about having to pass the bills before we can read them? Remember the public outrage?
Fox News reports on just who negotiated the latest Greek-style social welfare tax cut bill that will add an estimated 100 billion dollars to the deficit. (according to the above-linked Hill.com article): (emphasis added)
Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee Chairman, and Republican Rep. Dave Camp, the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, confirmed the agreement to Fox News late Wednesday, capping a long day of wrangling over the final details of the measure.
The legislation would continue a 2 percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax, renew jobless benefits averaging about $300 a week for people languishing for long periods on unemployment rolls and protect doctors from a huge cut in their Medicare reimbursements.
The measure carries a price tag of roughly $150 billion over the coming year, partly financed by new auctions of telecommunications spectrum to wireless companies and by requiring newly-hired federal workers to contribute more toward their pensions. The pension provision was watered down from a version sought by House Republicans, and tentatively agreed to by key Democrats, that would have required current federal workers to contribute more to their defined benefit pensions.
Noticeably absent from the ‘negotiations” were any conservative politicians, thus this is referred to as “The Progressive Tax Cut Ext. Deal” of 2012. Once again, Congress has borrowed more money and added to the national debt by refusing to add offsets to pay for it. This pattern of irresponsibility brings the much-ballyhooed cliche’ pay-as-you-go (Pay-Go) that was spewed by Speaker Pelosi as a demand that all legislation be paid for before passage, to new heights of hypocrisy. If the [supposed] summer of recovery has indeed turned this country around, then why would members of Congress continue to rape the Social Security fund to hand out another unemployment extension? According to Obama and the Democrats, they have added 4, 5,or 6 (depending which Obama speech lie you believe) million new jobs to the economy. Yet they still demand to give unemployed workers another extension of benefits.
More debt and deficit spending brought to America by the progressive members of Congress, as they brag about their happiness on reaching this “bi-partisan agreement.”
“Everything should not have to be a fight, and I am glad that most of my Republican colleagues put the interests of the middle class ahead of politics to forge this agreement,” Senate Majority Leader harry Reid said in a statement. “Americans expect us to put our differences aside and find common ground. In the months ahead, I hope this shift to the middle becomes the norm, rather than the exception.” Yes indeed, adding billions to the trillion-dollar deficits is now being hailed as “progress” and “common ground” by Liberal Democrat Harry Reid. Doesn’t that make the hard-working taxpayers that have to foot the bill for all of this irresponsibility feel all warm and fuzzy inside?