Why is it assumed the Bush era tax cuts will be extended in December?

[woolldog]

Was just reading an article on Yahoo! and came across this line:

"The Congressional Budget Office report also says that annual deficits will remain in the $1 trillion range for the next several years if Bush-era tax cuts slated to expire in December are extended, as commonly assumed."

http://news.yahoo.com/us-budget-deficit-dip-1-1t-152358458.html

Why?

[RC]

1. 'cause if they raise taxes, that will make the recession worse.

Never mind things were OK until bu$he cut taxes for his friends and charged his wars on our credit card.
It never seems to occur to anyone to stop the wars and raise taxes to get us back out of this recession.

[woolldog]

4. I hate that

everyone seems to have bought into this supply side BS that raising taxes will hurt an economic recovery. Seems that Clinton raised taxes during a recession and it wasn't the end of the world.

[RKP5637]

7. +1000 +++ n/t

[doc03]

2. It will be all or nothing. If the tax-cuts for middle class expire

it will be a huge tax increase. So the Democrats will agree to extend them all again.

[handmade34]

3. just did my taxes

and I paid a higher effective tax rate than Mitt Romney ... that said, ...increase them all if that is what it takes!!

[doc03]

5. I am retired and paid 18.6% in taxes this year n/t

[hfojvt]

6. it is commonly assumed that 80% of them will be retained

because that is what Obama talks about.

If you look at page 4 here http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxcompromise2010.pdf

extending the Bush tax cuts, all of them, costs $301 billion a year, with 72.4% of the benefits going to the top 20%.

However, what Obama proposes - keeping the Bush tax cuts for all incomes less than $250,000 costs $244 billion a year, about 81% of the total cost of the Bush tax cuts, and with a whopping 61.4% of the benefits going to the top 20%.

Nobody is proposing a more sensible idea, like only keeping the Bush tax cuts for those in the bottom 60% - those with income under $53,000, who only get 13.8% of the benefits of the Bush tax cuts.