Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin rightly called the Toomey plan a “breakthrough” in the negotiations; indeed, it was the only truly new idea offered during this process.
The essence of the plan was to dramatically reduce the deductions and credits wealthier taxpayers can claim to reduce their tax liability. That would generate enough revenue to both permanently reduce marginal rates for all taxpayers and provide more than $250 billion for deficit reduction. Added to other receipts, taxes and fees, the Republican plan amounted to more than $500 billion in deficit reduction revenue and $900 billion in spending reductions. We believe this lowering of the rates and broadening of the tax base would have spurred economic growth, created jobs and, in the process, generated billions more in revenue from growth in the economy.
Now, here’s the key: None of this can happen if the current law’s automatic tax increases occur on Jan. 1, 2013. We can’t both reform the code as Republicans propose and undo it all 12 months later.
Democrats made a point of saying that they would accept the new tax revenue in the plan but that they still also wanted the 2013 tax increase — which, of course, would negate the benefits of the proposal.
Why do Republicans believe our proposal is preferable to the automatic 2013 rate increases? Apart from the fact that our economy could not withstand the almost $4 trillion tax increase, it would directly and adversely affect small-business investment decisions. Business decisions are highly sensitive to the rates of the capital gains, dividends and death tax, as well as marginal tax rates. That’s why Republicans would leave them alone and raise revenue instead by limiting personal itemized deductions and credits that have much less impact on investment decisions by small-business owners.
The point is, it matters both how and how much the government takes from taxpayers.
So it was not some political attachment to the Bush tax cuts that stymied committee success but, rather, the refusal of the committee’s Democrats to acknowledge the inconsistency in claiming to accept the amount and way the Republican plan would raise tax revenue while insisting that the 2013 tax increases (at least those affecting investment decisions) must also occur.
At no time in the negotiations did the Democratic committee members drop their insistence that, one way or the other, any deal had to include a trillion dollars in new taxes. Republicans believe that would kill job creation and economic recovery. In the long run, a strong economy producing more wealth (and, therefore, more tax revenue) is how we will both reduce the deficit and regain the prosperity that all Americans deserve.
Because of this committee that was set up to fail not being able to come to any decision the brunt of the cuts will come from the military. Both military and civilian positions are in jeopardy. The word on the street says there is an 80,000 cut coming from the Army with a possible 30 or 40K more to follow. The other services will follow suit. The economy is in such dire straits and now there will be an additional 80+ men and women without jobs. This number doesn’t count the civilians that will lose their jobs. Granted some can retire, but for the most part families cannot live on retirement alone and will seek employment whether part or full time. This decrease in military readiness is detrimental to our country. As bill ayers said, the United States would be destroyed from within, and this action is only one of what is being done to decimate her. My heart is full of fear for the future of my daughters and their families. May God have mercy on us.
The demonrats are doing very similar things to our nation as the bolsheviks were doing to destabilize Russia…and all for the same purpose, that of creating so much chaos that people who are politically and historically ignorant will, through fear, simply give up all their constitutionally granted liberties for the pseudo-guilded cage of security on the collectivist plantation. Look at all these degenerates in the #OWS morass, who have the bizarre belief that they are entitled to other people’s hard earned money to pay for their wasted periods of debauched college pretentiousness, studying for “degrees” that could not possibly ever provide for a survivable income derived from anything remotely resembling productive work. A moderate is simply someone who has not taken the time or made the effort to research the details of progressive/marxist/collectivist history. Leftists cannot ever be trusted, period. EVAH. Either those who profess such amoral policies of government-sanctioned theft are too stupid to understand what they are spouting, or they are completely evil in pushing for policies that they know full well are designed to destroy the basic property rights from which all human liberty – nurtured by capitalism – inherently flows. It is so ironic that “left” rhymes with “theft”, because all the caterwauling about so-called ‘income inequality’ is nothing more than typical collectivist blather designed to camoflauge the true motive of the progressive, which is simply to steal as much as possible from people who earn it, shave off some pennies to throw to the uneducated masses in the form of government handouts, then live luxuriously on their ill-gotten gains while pretending to care about “the little people”. (i.e. any of Michelle Obama’s international trips, and Barack’s incessant golf outings while our economy is sailing into an iceberg-filled sea of perdition.)
I am tired of empty-headed gasbags , overfilled with their self-inflated delusions of their personal enlightenment and misplaced sanctimony, demanding that after 16 years of hard work learning my physician skills – on top of 25 years of serving my country as a military officer – that I am to now be required to give up half or more of my income to finance the manipulative schemes of political overlords to buy off the votes of those too ignorant to see how they are being raped, put in slave chains, and sold off for the benefit of no one but the snide apparatachiks.
TIME is running out for them, but they still have time to sink AMERICA deeper,
and hurt a lot of people in it
we hear the warning all over, we see the ows wondering all over the AMERICA,
we hear SOMEONE surprise when one brave school leader decide to have the CONSTITUTION RECITE
BY STUDENT AS A MANDATORY EVENT, AND WHEN ASK WHY, THE MOTHER IMMIGRANT FROM SOME
FOREIGN VILLAGE, SAYS WE’RE SUPPOSE TO BE A GLOBAL NATION, SHE PROTEST IT,
WOW THAT IS STILL RESONATE IN MY MIND, is that what the IMMIGRANTS THINK WHEN THEY LAND IN THIS FREE AMERICA? SOMETHING VERY WRONG IS HAPPENING WHEN YOU HEAR MEMBER OF THE LEADERSHIP SENDING AMERICAN FAMILIES TO HELL, BECAUSE THEY ARE
TELLING THEM THEY ARE WRONG IN SUCH AND SUCH SPENDING SPREE,
YES THAT IS WRONG
OTHER FROM THE SAME ELECTED DEMOCRATS CALL THEM TERRORIST, YES THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE ALSO.
It irritates me to no end, that democrats/liberals/progressives are such dirty and dishonest players, without one iota of decency, ethics, honesty or concern for those who elected them or the country as a whole.