Joan Walsh: Obama extends tax cuts for the rich that the GOP passed with chicanery and Cheney's vote

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Tuesday, Dec 7, 2010 00:07 ET

Party time for Bush and Cheney!
Obama extends tax cuts for the rich that the GOP passed with chicanery and Cheney's vote. How did we get here?



By Joan Walsh

http://www.salon.com/news/taxes/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/12/06/bush_cheney_party

I know they weren't the best of friends when they left Washington, but I bet former President Bush and Dick Cheney at least had a phone call tonight congratulating one another on one of the great heists in history. In 2001, they knew they couldn't make their budget-busting tax cuts for the rich permanent, so they agreed to phase them out in 2010, leaving the political consequences to another administration. Even with that chicanery, the Bush tax cuts were divisive enough that they required Cheney to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. No problem. That's how Republicans play: They reward their wealthy base.

Increasingly it seems, Democrats, too, reward the wealthy in their base, and ignore their much larger constituency of working and middle class voters, struggling in the economy destroyed by Bush and Cheney. President Obama's compromise was a long time coming, telegraphed for months, but depressing nonetheless. The good news is that he got a little bit more for caving than some Democrats expected. It's great that unemployment insurance may be extended 13 months; many Americans will appreciate a payroll tax cut, an extended Earned Income Tax Credit and the latest patch of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

But the concessions Obama apparently won from the GOP shouldn't obscure the fact that his party lost, and their party won. I want to agree with my colleague Steve Kornacki, who argues that in the end, with the package of small but not insignificant stimulative programs that are part of the deal, Obama got the best result he could. Steve may be right, but I still think a sharply drawn battle over both the budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, and extending benefits for the unemployed could have – in some version of reality, maybe not ours – strengthened the Democratic party brand, to use a word I don't love, and reminded confused voters who amd what we stand for.

Meanwhile, after the vast transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent of Americans in the last 30 years, this deal makes me feel like I live in an oligarchy. (I laid all of this out in this essay on "Winner Take All Politics" exactly a month ago.) To get a little bit of help for the unemployed, we have to deliver bushels of cash to the wealthiest Americans and their GOP agents?

[TwilightGardener]

1. I will argue, however, that the economy and jobs picture makes the

circumstances different. Had things been looking better, there would have been more room to let the taxes expire, there wouldn't have been pressure on unemployment benefits, and we wouldn't have had to bribe the rich to start finally creating jobs with unemployment at 9.8.

[democracy1st]

2. With Unemployment over 9% the GOP was going to cut off unemployment benefits at Xmas

just think about that for a min. Obama couldn't beat them with that amunition ?