July 22, 2004
The White House Raises Your Taxes so Kerry Can't Lower Them
filed under: Stuff to be pissed off aboutUnbelievable.
Jesse at Pandagon scoops this out of the NY Times and heaps upon it the derision it deserves.
Here's the summary: some of the massively popular middle class tax cuts are set to expire. The child tax credit would shrink, the marriage penalty would creep back in, and the expansion of the 10% bracket to include more middle-income families would shrink again. Unless congress does something to extend them.
Almost everyone wants to extend these cuts. Kerry has said repeatedly that he would keep most of the Bush tax cuts on middle income families. House Repubs were looking forward to locking the extensions before going home for the meat of campaign season. The only points of disagreement were: "how long?" and "do we have to guarantee we can pay for it," but even those conflicts were on the way to being resolved.
But now the extensions have been blocked. By who? Some screaming lefty communist liberal?
Nope.
By the White House.
Because, you see, if Democratic lawmakers were to vote FOR the massively popular extension, then those pesky Democrats could say to their constituents, "I voted to keep your taxes low."
And "Democrats will RAISE your TAXES" is one of the cardinal scare tactics that the Repubs rely on come votin' time.
So rather than allow Dems to share credit for a popular and needed extension of a pseudo-sensible tax cut, the White House took an irreconcilably hard line, and scuttled the whole effort.
They'll cut off OUR NOSE to spite Kerry's face. Great.
Posted by rjt at July 22, 2004 11:09 AM