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I see your point, but there aren’t any Tax Cuts. Tax Rates for the under $400,000 crowd will remain unchanged.

There are only Tax Increases for the over $400,000 crowd.

I realize we are dealing in semantics, but Obama will get credit for doing what President Bush did, cutting Tax Rates.

The only reason there was a ten year limit was because the Tax Rate Cuts, which RAISED Tax Revenue BTW, were not passed with a Super Majority in the Senate, therefore they contained a Sunset Provision. Too bad Spending Bills don’t meet the same fate.

There are tax cuts. If we do nothing, the tax rates dictated by the current law continue in effect. I realize that the current law dictates that the tax rates go back up to the 2001 levels; but that is the current law.

Since it is now January 1st, the current tax rates are identical to the tax rates of January 1st, 2001. That is a fact. It does mean your taxes likely will go up this year, under the current law, and if you want to call that a tax increase, well it is, so go ahead.

But realize that it already happened. Your taxes are higher, right now.

So, what do you want to do about that? The tax rates right now are the January 2001 tax rates. If I tell you we can pass a law with no sunset provision that lowers the tax rate you pay, that is a “tax cut”, because it will make your taxes on the day the bill is signed LOWER than they are today.

Suppose in 2009, the democrats with their supermajority had passed a new law setting the taxes to 50% for everybody.

Then suppose today, we were discussing lowering the tax rates back to the Bush rates, and to 40% for the highest bracket. Would you argue that this isn’t a “tax cut” since back in 2009 the taxes were the same?

If so, then nothing we do is a tax cut, because back before we passed the 16th amendment, nobody paid income taxes at all, and even afterwards, the tax rates were lower for most of us at some point in the past.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t WANT to keep the bush tax rates (although I would love to have the discussion over why we claim that THOSE particular rates are the perfect ones, and not rates that might be 1% lower or 1% higher than those rates — we fall into the trap of claiming that current law is the best law, rather than asking what the best law SHOULD be).

I’m arguing that in the current political environment, I’d like to see the argument that shows how we could have gotten a permanent law setting tax rates for everybody at the “Bush” levels, when we couldn’t even do that when we first passed those Bush tax cuts.

And if you have no plan or reasonable expectation to achieve that, let’s stop pretending otherwise, and argue about whether a permanent tax law with the bush rates for 99% of people is better or worse than the Jaunary 1, 2001 tax rates for all people.

Because that was the argument. I could argue that we’d be better off letting the taxes go up, so everybody can see that you can’t simply tax yourself to balance. I would note when people scream that we had budget surplus and a thriving economy for several years with the tax rates that went back into effect today, so you are going to have to work hard to prove that they are impossible to maintain.