Some are now saying that Obama got the best of the tax cut deal,I dont agree. To Republicans this is Bushes finest accomplishment,and Obama caved to Republicans to extend the tax cuts. Who got the best of the deal in your opinions ? A few opinions I was reading this mourning http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120904472.html Swindle of the year By Charles Krauthammer Friday, December 10, 2010; Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 - and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years - which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat? If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies. No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president's deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality. Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way - mostly tax cuts - rather than the Democrats' spending orgy of Stimulus I. That's consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget. At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012. Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we're-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility. And he gets all this in return for what? For a mere two-year postponement of a mere 4.6-point increase in marginal tax rates for upper incomes. And an estate tax rate of 35 percent - it jumps insanely from zero to 55 percent on Jan. 1 - that is somewhat lower than what the Democrats wanted. No, cries the left: Obama violated a sacred principle. A 39.6 percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? "This is the public option debate all over again," said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities, thus setting us inexorably on the road to the left's Promised Land: a Canadian-style single-payer system. The left is similarly clueless on the tax-cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus - what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I but was heretofore politically unattainable. Obama's public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and politically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the independents who elected him in 2008 - and abandoned the Democrats in 2010 - is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception that he is a man of the left. Hence that news-conference attack on what the administration calls the "professional left" for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama's Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity - their ideological stupidity and inability to see the "long game" really do get under Obama's skin - but a decidedly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican? No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African Americans have been this party's most loyal constituency. They vote 9 to 1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own reelection? Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand - and therefore vote down - the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president.
Jonathan Cowan President and co-founder, Third Way : Shhhh! Donât tell Republicansâ¦but this is the best thing that could happen for Obama. In exchange for one item on the Republican wish list, Obama gets an unprecedented and massive payroll tax cut for the middle class, a college tuition tax break, a major extension in unemployment benefits, a handful of badly needed business provisions, and nearly a trillion dollars in new stimulus spending in the form of tax breaks. Democrats should take the deal before the Republicans figure out, in the words, of Charles Krauthammer, that theyâve been âsnookered.â Of course the GOP is likely expecting that many Democrats will follow the ill-conceived advice of Paul Krugman and others on the left who refuse to remove their ideological blinders and see how strong and urgently needed this package is. If they do that, theyâll most certainly have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Craig Shirley Reagan biographer and president, Shirley and Banister Public Affairs : The Republicans had their pants taken off by Obama and they donât even know it. Rather than making the marginal rates permanent (or even lower) they left themselves to fight again over the same terrain in two years, rather than mounting an offensive campaign to continually lower the rates. Even a mediocre commander would tell you that you shouldnât have to fight for the same terrain twice. Also, why would the Republicans allow the argument that the Steinbrenner family paid exactly zero in death taxes and yet the rest of us will have to pay 35 percent beginning Jan. 1? Is George Steinbrenner that special, even in death? Dying in 2010 may have been a good career move for Steinbrenner, but what about the rest of us? The death tax is immoral and corrupt and it only goes to fund an immoral and corrupt government.
Rich Gold Partner, Holland & Knight LLP : As I wrote the other day in this space, the president got such a deal from a policy and a political perspective. He negotiated the longest unemployment extension in history and wrestled a significant amount of -- yes I will use the word -- stimulus funding from the Republicans in return for a short-term extension of lower income tax rates for the wealthy and an estate tax extension. And from a political perspective, he comes off as the uniter not the divider. It probably helps him to have House liberals throwing a temper tantrum as he gets to wear the âI stood up to my party when they were obstinateâ badge to holiday parties the next few weeks. Whereâs the loss here?
Darrell M. West Vice President, Governance Studies, Brookings : Krauthamer is right on this one. The hidden truth about this legislation is that it is a second stimulus package. Some economists estimate that it will cut unemployment by at least 1.5 percentage points over what otherwise would be the case. Although Obama gave away a few things policy-wise, he has dramatically boosted his re-election prospects for 2012.
This proves how the Bush tax cuts over all were more targeted to the middle and lower class. I have never seen Liberal Congressmen fight so hard to keep most of a Bush policy in place. As they said many times these original tax cuts were never voted on by the full Congress and now they are fully endorsing most of them