It looks like the poor may end up getting even poorer, in a time when “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is an unrealistic option (there are 5 people looking for work for each job opening). Apparently this is supposed to be the “change we can believe in” that I voted for. :rolleyes: With political friends like these, who needs enemies? Maybe I shouldn’t have expected anything better. I’ve seen him talk a lot about helping the Middle Class, but I haven’t heard a peep from Obama about helping the poor.
I’ve been waiting patiently for Obama to reveal his secret radical socialist agenda, but it’s taking a lot longer than I thought.
I think their analysis focuses on the payroll tax change in isolation of the whole package. It does look like low income workers will pay a bit more out of each paycheck, and in that sense it’s a raw deal. However, based on the tables available at the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of the compromise, I think everyone ends up with an overall reduction in taxes. -Take a look at the tables comparing current law/current policy to the compromise tax structure.
Of course, the very high income people get an awesome deal, while the low income schlubs get crumbs. On the other hand, with Republican intransigence, I can’t see how we get a 13 month extension on unemployment insurance benefits without the compromise.
Entirely unfair, but that’s par for the SDMB liberal course lately. If Obama had followed the (admittedly not very cohesive) advice of his “base” thus far, we’d have had no movement on health insurance reform and even more stubborn heel digging from the Party of No that he has to deal with every damn day.
Obama’s never been an ideological purist. He’s a pragmatist who’s getting things done. And for that, he’s being called a “sellout” and -ideologically worse- an “incrementalist” by the people who should be happiest to have an effective POTUS on their side of most issues.
Og’s sake, weren’t we the ones who pushed back at the Right’s charges that we believed in Obama as a Christ-like “Magical Negro” who’d make everything right once in office? And now you expect him to be able to adhere to some progressive purity and still get movement from a divided Congress?
You’re mistaken on a number of levels, Blalron. But one of them is believing that Obama did this as a kind of olive branch to encourage future cooperation. That’s not why he did it. He did it because the alternative was that everyone’s taxes go up.
I find this whole thing baffling for two reasons. First, the same people who have been whining that Obama doesn’t recognize that the GOP will just obstruct everything are the people now arguing that if only Obama had drawn a firm line in the sand the GOP would have come around. Second, a lot of Democrats are calling Obama a sellout coward because they disagree with him about a tactical decision. What the fuck? Reasonable people can think that Obama could have negotiated for more (I see no evidence of this, but that’s neither here nor there), but there is absolutely no reason to think that Obama somehow did this out of cowardice or for personal gain.
We keep hearing from quite a few posters around here that letting the Bush tax cuts “for the wealthy” expire is not the same as raising their taxes. I’m sure one of them will be along shortly to explain that the “making work pay” program was only set to run for 2 years, so letting it expire does not raise anyone’s taxes, and to tell the OP what a dumb-ass he is for thinking otherwise.
“Incrementalist” I can deal with. I thought the health care law is a good start, a stepping stone for better stuff in the future. But this is actually a march backwards. The poor are going to be worse off under this deal.
I think he could have gotten more because he got practically nothing. The Repubs get to keep the tax cut in place for the rich. It will be permanent because if they have the house, they will pass it and filibuster the Senate. During Bush, the top 400 earners doubled their income and cut their taxes by 50 percent. i do not know why it should continue.
We fight over the inheritance tax. Only .24 percent of families will pay it. It is the richest in the world. The Walton family will get about 32 billion dollars by killing it. We know who the pols work for. The Repub fight for the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor over and over.
All Obama gets is a 1 year extension of unemployment for a 2 year and possible permanent huge tax cut for the rich. It does not ever cover the 99ers. It is a terrible deal.
I agree that the deal continues an unfair advantage given to the very wealthy, but I disagree that the poor will be worse off. With this deal, the EITC and child tax credit provisions of the 2009 stimulus act are also extended, plus the afore mentioned UI extension. And if all of the Bush tax cuts are just allowed to expire, the very poor will be hit worse than anyone else and there’s little reason to believe a Republican majority House in 2011 and 2012 will enact a tax cut for the lower brackets without a corresponding cut for upper percentile any way.
I decided, purely on a spur of the moment whim, that it would be amusing if I used the GOP way of framing this issue against them. Maybe it hurts my cause in the long run to tacitly accept their framing, but this is the pit and not all pit threads are deeply thought out treatises.
It’s a bad policy decision, regardless of how we frame it.
As I said in another thread, I think part of this is Bush’s fault.
Actually, I’m serious. I think Democrats saw what he did, believe he did so with little to no negotiation or compromise with their ideological opponents, and think that Obama can and should do the same, especially with Congressional majorities.
That’s just it, what did Bush accomplish? He passed a bunch of things in the wake of 9/11 with near unanimity, including the PATRIOT Act. He passed bipartisan education legislation that was not part of the core GOP platform. He passed prescription drug coverage that was not part of the core GOP platform. And he cut taxes, temporarily, and through reconciliation.
Bush’s is not a record of steamrolling Congress to get his right-wing agenda through. The only arguably right-wing big picture legislation he passed was either because of 9/11 or using reconciliation.
Meanwhile, Obama has signed more of his party’s core legislation in two years than any President in forty years.
Oh, OK. I didn’t realize you were being facetious. Never mind…
BTW, I’m cool with the argument that not letting temporary tax cuts continue isn’t tantamount to raising someone’s taxes. The “raise”, to the extent there is one, was built into the system from the beginning. If anyone is “raising” someone’s taxes, it was the guys, like Bush, who designed the cuts to expire in the first place.
It wasn’t so much designing as coping with the limitations. They had to do it that way in order to use the “reconciliation” dodge. That was before they realized what a ghastly, UnAmerican, socialist horror it was.
Yes, that was a bit sloppy on my part. I’m sure Bush et al would have preferred to make the cuts permanent, but had to make them temporary to use “reconciliation” to pass them.
The diabolically successful plan to elect a “shadow” Republican has unfortunately been revealed too soon. But it is just as well. The strain was begining to wear upon Obama, as evidenced by his recent press conferences.
Soon he, Rush Limbaugh and Elton John can all go golfing together.
That’s only a threesome. Surely than could get Sean Hannity for a fourth, don’t you think?