"GOP to jobless: Drop dead" Steve Pearlstein Bus Journalist WaPo

[jillan]

There are so many great points in his op-ed, I had a hard time choosing. Hope you will read the entire piece.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/16/AR2010111607468.html?nav=hcmoduletmv

There's no better proof of that than the so-called debate over extending the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000. Unable to defend more tax cuts for the rich, Republicans like to pretend that their real concern is for job creation, citing the fact that about half of all business profits now flow through partnerships and small corporations that are taxed at personal rates.

But look more closely at the argument and it turns out to be "largely bogus," according to Eric Toder, a former Treasury and IRS official who now works at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Very few of those businesses earn more than $250,000 in profit, and those that do tend to be very successful hedge funds and law firms that are flush with cash and unlikely to be dissuaded from hiring extra employees or make new investments because of a 4 percentage-point change in the marginal tax. Because most hiring and investment can be done with pre-tax dollars, Toder said, the tax rate is largely irrelevant to those decisions.

That's the micro view. The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!

These inconvenient truths, however, are simply ignored by Republicans, who would have us all believe that extending upper-income tax cuts is the most crucial economic issue we face - not just this year but for all time.

In fact, if Republicans were truly interested in reducing the deficit while stimulating private-sector job creation, they would have jumped to embrace the idea floated last week by Sen. Mark Warner, the centrist Democrat from Virginia: let high-end tax rates return to where they were during the Clinton years and use the $65 billion in additional income over the next two years for tax breaks for businesses that increase investments or hire new employees. After that, the extra revenue would go toward deficit reduction.

And how many of Warner's Republican colleagues have called to express interest in his idea? So far, not a one.






:applause:

[liberalhistorian]

1. And yet many of these jobless voted

in these republican scrooges. I will simply never understand that.

[jillan]

2. Just like a family member of mine voted for Jan Brewer even tho she cut his benefits.

How can people be so utterly clueless?


edit for really bad typo :P

[Frisbee]

4. That has always been something...

that just blows my mind. Are these people just that gullible, dim-witted or so sure that some day they are going to win the lottery that they are voting in their own long-term best interest? I just don't understand it. :shrug:

[awoke_in_2003]

5. no, just brainwashed...

we have a propaganda machine that would make Goebbels blush

[KILL THE WISE ONE]

3. it has to be Stockholm syndrome

I know mental illness is contagious but .... what else could explain it.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

6. Mostly, it's the propaganda machine. n/t