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Post by Hoosier Hillbilly on Oct 21, 2011 5:06:39 GMT -5
The deficit reduction supercommittee is apparently bogged down in the usual partisan squabbles. Big surprise. The Democrats won’t accept a package of cuts only, and the Republicans balk at any tax increases. Will the threat of the nasty automatic cuts that will happen if there’s no agreement be enough to move anyone off dead center? The truth is that the budget can’t be balanced by cuts alone; some revenues must be increased to make things work. Republicans used to understand this. Ronald Reagan certainly did, but that was before the anti-tax pledge became a badge of conservative ideological purity
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Post by Hoosier Hillbilly on Oct 21, 2011 5:18:31 GMT -5
Super Committee's Cuts Anything But Automatic .
WASHINGTON -- The 12-member super committee created to slash the federal deficit is powered by the threat that if it doesn't come up with $1.2 trillion in savings, automatic, across-the-board cuts will be instituted to reach that same goal, with half of those cuts hitting the Pentagon.
Don't believe it.
The supposed across-the-board cuts aren't slated to go into effect until January 1, 2013. Put more simply: They might not ever go into effect.
The automatic cuts -- known as sequestration -- are often discussed in Washington as if they're certain, an inevitability that Congress won't be able to prevent. But on the same day those cuts would go into effect, the Bush tax rates, which President Obama extended for two years, are set to expire, leading to an "automatic" tax hike that is treated in Washington as anything but inevitable. (That the two coming policy changes are approached so differently -- cuts are expected; expiring tax breaks for the wealthy are brushed aside -- is a window into Washington's priorities.)
A host of other tax cuts and credits will expire on the same day, including the alternative minimum tax, ethanol tax credits, renewable energy credits and others important to businesses, the wealthy and the middle class.
A lame duck Congress would have two months after the 2012 election to stave off the expiration of both that tax policy and the super committee's "automatic" cuts.
The most likely scenario: The super committee locks up along partisan lines and, after the 2012 election, bipartisan negotiators deal with the tax cuts and the super committee's sequestration cuts, along with a basket of other expiring provisions, in one set of negotiations. Democrats will be pressured by the coming sequestration, while Republicans will be motivated by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. And all of their negotiations will take place in a political and economic climate impossible to predict today.
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Post by Hoosier Hillbilly on Dec 14, 2011 15:41:05 GMT -5
us.f1209.mail.yahoo.com/ya/download?mid=1%5f25936%5fAKhYimIAAIuKTukE%2fwl0GQr8pLw&pid=2.3&fid=Inbox&inline=1 The downed drone in Iran is one of those godsends to cartoonists–you can do so much with it. Our increasing reliance on remotely-controlled unmanned weapons has its plusses and minuses. Fewer troops are put in harm’s way, but at the same time it’s much too easy to destroy harmless things and kill innocent civilians and from far away with no accountability. I started thinking about what it would be like if there were unmanned drones in this country, and decided that there already are. There’s no way for the civilian population of this country to shoot down a defense budget that’s insanely large and destructive. The military budget is so well protected by industry lobbyists and congressional delegations from defense-heavy regions that even useless weapons programs and obsolete bases keep getting funded year after year. And if you believe that the automatic cuts resulting from the Supercommittee’s impasse on budget reduction are ever going to happen, you haven’t paid attention to how Washington works.
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