[sickoflibs]

RE :”it requires the US Treasury to make up for the shortfall in payroll tax revenue.....
Which assumes that this tax cut doesn't generate enough additional economic activity to pay for itself. Is this assumption also applied to an extension of the cut to the top income tax bracket? “

Keep in mind the Bush tax cuts expired because the budget reconciliation rules that allowed them to be passed with a simple Senate majority requiring that any provision that adds to the deficit must expire within something like 8 years. The CBO makes that determination based on static budget analysis.

In addition the SS entitlement is supposed to be directly tied to the FICA tax. You know the saying “I paid in..” or “they paid in..” ?

I don't see how a FICA tax cut could possibly pay for itself, especially the one on the employee side. If it did then Obama's Making Work Pay tax credits would have payed for themselves also too. The keynesian 'they will spend it' creating 'jobs' arguments are almost identical for both.

[marstegreg]

Maybe that is why they were trying to “dumb us down”, so we can’t do the math! The same math they use to come up with the jobs numbers that have to be revised every week. That’s the best I can come up with as a response. You can bet that after these guys are gone we will find out a lot about the goings on in the admin. (unless they shread it)