Here's a profile in political courage shameless pandering: Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling calls for making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. Slashing taxes and red tape is the way to unleash the economy's potential, writes Bowling, and boy do we need that now, poised as we are for a double-dip recession. If you're worried about increasing the deficit, well, Bowling adds, cutting spending rather than raising taxes is the way to balance the budget.
OK. Fine. Time to bring out the chart again:
Again I will point out that you cannot make meaningful cuts to federal spending by eliminating pork barrel projects in someone else's congressional district. You will have to raise the retirement age, and/or cut Medicare, and/or end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drastically reduce America's military footprint abroad. Which cuts does Bolling support? Funny. He never gets around to saying.
Targeted tax cuts can spur economic growth, as we see in the case of new home sales, which have tanked since the tax credit expired at the end of June. But permanently eliminating the estate tax and cutting income and capital gains tax rates will deprive the federal budget of hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decades, just as retiring baby boomers make unprecedented demands on Social Security and Medicare. That's irresponsible.
Look, we have two problems: in the short term, the economy stinks, and in the long term, a rising tide of red ink threatens to swamp the country.
The solution to the short term problem is deficit spending to jump start the economy, ease the pain of the unemployed and aid state and local governments whose tax receipts have plummeted but who can't run deficits. The solution to the long term problem is some mixture of tax increases and benefit cuts, such as raising both the retirement age and the amount of income subject to FICA taxes, which stands at $109,000. It would also be an act of fiscal responsibility not to start any more dumb wars, to say nothing of respect for human life, international law, etc., etc.
Republicans have it exactly backwards. They voted against extending unemployment benefits, against emergency funding to save teacher jobs, and they will vote for making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. That's a recipe for pain now, and red ink in the future.
But they don't care. All they care about is cutting taxes for the rich, their most reliable constituency.
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