Concerning this news, I suppose I could choose to cackle with partisan glee:
Congressional Republicans have for the first time retreated from their hard-line stance against new taxes, offering to raise federal tax collections by nearly $300 billion over the next decade as part of a plan to tame the national debt.
But Democrats rejected the offer Tuesday — along with the notion that Republicans had made a significant concession that could end the long-standing political impasse — leaving a special debt-reduction committee far from compromise with less than two weeks until its Thanksgiving deadline.
Democrats have always said that any real progress on deficit reduction would require the GOP to accept tax increases. Now, they have, and Democrats still won't budge. Who're the obstructionists now, huh? Which party cares more about partisan brinksmanship than the needs of the country, huh, huh, huh?
Instead, I would like to say to those congressional Republicans: Are you nuts?
The new revenue would be split between outright tax increases and other forms of government income, including higher fees for an array of federal services, asset sales and higher Medicare premiums for well-off seniors — provisions that are more typically counted not as revenue but as income that helps to reduce spending.
The proposal included about $300 billion in actual tax increases, marking the first time Republicans offered to acquiesce to that key Democratic demand. The offer envisions a tax code rewrite that would lower rates for everyone while raising overall tax collections by $250 billion, mainly by limiting the value of itemized deductions such as write-offs for home mortgage interest.
In addition, the Republicans would raise about $40 billion by applying the new inflation index to the tax code, a move that would push people more rapidly into higher tax brackets.
Have they completely lost their minds? haven't they been paying the slightest bit of attention to what their base and a majority of Americans have been telling them? Who talked them into political suicide this time? There are those "fees" again, and a scheme to push people into higher tax brackets.
Not all of the proposal is objectionable. It has long been a conservative-libertarian desire to lower rates, simplify the tax code and eliminate deductions. But surely this isn't the time in our history to encourage an increase in revenue, even if it doesn't; those yahoos in Washington simply do not know how to spend it responsibly. It's like giving obese, diabetic children free run of the candy store.
