Interesting interpretation of the tax-cut deal.


>Swindle of the year
>
>By Charles Krauthammer
>Washington Post
>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.
>
>The six German saboteurs referred to in my last column were not 
>shot. They were electrocuted.
>
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/emailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask] 
>

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