The first fallacy the Democrats repeat over and over is to call the proposed Obama tax increases as repealing the Bush tax cuts. The so-called “cuts” were cuts back in the year when GWB was president and Congress passed the tax reductions. At this point, there are no tax cuts, there are proposed tax increases. The Dems assume you are willing to suspend reason in order to push through the largest tax increase in US history, during a recession.
The Washington Examiner looks at other ways ‘Pelosi-nomics’ requires willing suspension of reason
For one thing, they assume that a tax cut is a gift from the government to the taxpayer rather than government choosing not to take something away that the taxpayer already possesses. Otherwise, to be logically consistent, the assumption must be that the money in taxpayers’ hands is actually government property, which we are allowed to keep until the tax collector demands that we return it in the form of taxes.
Another way of understanding the fallacious nature of the Pelosi argument that tax cuts must be “paid for” by government is to focus on the $700 billion she says will be added to the deficit if all of the Bush measures are extended. Where does Pelosi think those 700 billion dollar bills currently reside if not in the hands of those who will have to pay higher levies if her position is accepted?
Also at the Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott writes that Washington is why the economy is not growing
On every front, the federal government is creating more investment-killing tax uncertainty, issuing endless pages of new bureaucratic regulations on the economy, and preventing firms from taking actions that could create hundreds of thousands of new positions and kick-start a muscular recovery with real legs.
Political grandstanding by President Obama and Democratic leaders of the lame-duck Congress like Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York on extending the Bush tax cuts is only the most obvious example of how Washington is why the economy is at a standstill.
The same Obama who now says he doesn’t want to extend the Bush tax cuts for “the rich” said last year that “the last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy and put businesses further in a hole.”
The recession is officially over, but with unemployment barely below recession levels and virtually no new jobs being created, it should be clear now is not the time to raise taxes and “put businesses further in the hole,” either, whether by letting the Bush tax rates on upper incomes expire, or adopting Schumer’s demagogic idea of raising taxes on “millionaires.”
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, at least 80 percent of the income received by Schumer’s rich villains is from business investments, so increasing their taxes will, as Obama said, put them into deeper holes.
The Bush tax cuts are only one front in this debate. Obama is also tightening the federal bureaucracy’s regulatory straightjacket on economic growth. As the Heritage Foundation reported a week before the election, the hidden tax of regulation costs at least $1.75 trillion annually. That’s twice as much as the government collects in taxes on individuals.
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Then there is the Obama Permitorium on energy exploration and production here in the United States, which threatens even greater long-term damage to the economy’s ability to generate new jobs and growth
Creating uncertainty, raising taxes to individuals and the private sector, and creating more regulation is the sure way to cripple an economy.
There’s also this,
Take a look at the no-drill zone:
To please the environmentalist lobby, the administration is walking away from 7.5 billion barrels of oil and almost 60 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Media reports indicate that only a portion of the seas that are now off-limits contain enough crude to fill up more than 2.4 million cars with gasoline and natural gas to heat 8 million homes for 60 years.
Increasing dependency on foreign oil, and adding more government programs will keep the economy in dire straits for decades to come.
UPDATE
At Protein Wisdom, “Unemployment Rises to 9.8% as U.S. Adds Just 39,000 Jobs”
So. Unemployment is increasing. The Fed is printing money. And what is the Pelosi House doing? Passing tax increases on small business owners and the “rich” (families that make over $250k) — and then pledging to spend $4.5 BILLION on another layer of bureaucratic oversight added to school lunches at the behest of the First Lady, who it appears is now the unelected Czar of the country’s food policies.
Couple this with Obama’s recent reversal on offshore drilling — a move that will damage the economies of several states and serves as a boon to foreign competitors — and his backdoor affront on internet freedom, and there no two ways about this: we must conclude at this point that, as the markets brace for a potential crash, the “progressives” are intentionally out to sabotage the economy.
Mere stupidity no longer explains it.
