Thanks for the Gun, Stupid

So I’m reading this email teaser from National Journal’s Influence Alley called Spending Cuts Added to Plan B that says: “In a bid to win more support for Republican House Speaker John Boehner's Plan B to cut taxes for everyone but millionaires, GOP leaders are adding a second bill that would reduce the deficit and avoid the sequester, a GOP leadership aide told the Alley.”

So first I’m thinking “What tax cut?” Doesn’t a tax cut necessitate some sort of tax “cutting” action? The net result of the proposal is to increase taxes for some. If these guys worked on Wall Street and were this sloppy about language they’d go to jail.

And then I’m thinking “What spending cuts?” Doesn’t spending cuts require government spending to actually go down?

Only with DC’s dishonest budget math- thank you Dan Mitchell- can politicians claim that spending that will rise year-over-year for forever, is somehow spending cuts.

70 years after the New Deal, the public is waiting around for a true deal; a deal calculated for real people, not a welfare line for government workers and ideological scamsters.

“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life” Lord Salisbury told us “as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe.”

For close to a century experts have told us to put out trust in government. We have a host of them in our life everyday: Federal Reserve bankers, Education Department officials, Union economists, scientists on the government dole, Energy Department officials all here for our own good.

Yet, government doesn’t even pretend to try to solve the very problems they claim to care about. The “experts” at the EPA designed a tax on carbon to combat so-called global warming and even they won’t claim that the tax will bring down the earth’s temperature.

Still, a failed result won’t stop the experts from insisting on this tax for our own good.

As a consequence of the care of so many government experts who insist on doing stuff for our own good, we are now at a point where nothing is true.

Men marry men and we call it marriage. Doctors kill babies and we call it choice. We practice targeted discrimination against certain classes of people, under the law, and we call it justice.

We ban the religion of some in the public square as a matter of taste and call it a moral good.

In the name of safety, the government, which will not enforce common sense safety laws, which we all agree should be enforced, takes away guns for self-defense.

We “improve” public education by lowering standards rather than raising them; and we design a medical and retirement safety net that threatens not just life, but everything our country was built on: liberty, opportunity, property.

My religion tells me to fear not. That’s why I cling to it. Other have done the same for 2,000 years

My gun tells me to fear not, although its ammunition isn’t as refined as the word of God. Good men have armed themselves for the 500 years since Europeans first lived in North America.

Expert, government opinion? It’s been king for 70 years and it has a very spotty record.

It’s created wars and rumors of wars and real-life tragedies like communism and fascism and vegans.

Honey badger doesn’t care for government opinion, or the opinion of “journalists,” and faddists.

One needs to think of reductions in government spending like government reductions in employee costs (reducing the government workforce to save money).

Any time that the government states that it is reducing it’s workforce, it means that it is only moving personnel out of one bureaucratic division to another with the resulting decrease in the losing agency being flaunted as a reduction in force while not mentioning that the other agency has an increase in force.

Rule #1 is that the government NEVER reduces the workforce or NEVER actually reduces spending. It simply plays a “shell game” and fools the taxpayer.

So first I’m thinking “What tax cut?” Doesn’t a tax cut necessitate some sort of tax “cutting” action? The net result of the proposal is to increase taxes for some. If these guys worked on Wall Street and were this sloppy about language they’d go to jail.

A bill is a tax cut if the result of passing it makes the tax collected lower than it the bill is not passed.

The "Plan B" bill will result in significantly lower taxes if it passes, then if it does not pass. Therefore, it is a tax cut. That is why even the "keeper of the pledge", Grover Norquist's ATR, scores Plan B as a tax cut.

It is absolutely true that if we pass Plan B, in January taxes will be higher (for those making over $1 million) than they are on December 31st.

But if the bill is not passed, in January taxes will be higher on everybody.

That is because in 2001, we passed a bill that set the tax rate for 2011 at the same tax rate as 2000, lowering the tax rates only for the years 2001 through 2010.

And in 2010, we passed another bill that set the tax rate for 2013 at the same rate as 2000, lowering the tax rates only for the years 2011 and 2012.

Each of those bills effectively RAISED taxes, the first in 2011, and the second in 2013. But both were scored as tax cuts, and praised as such by conservatives.

If a bill that lowered taxes for only 2 years, and then raised them to 2000 levels for everybody, is considered a "tax cut", then certainly a bill that lowers tax rates for all of us, permanently, is a "tax cut" (I say "all of us" because the tax rates will be lowered on the first 1 million of income. Which means person making MORE than a million will still pay less in taxes under Plan B then they would under the previous tax cut bill, for 2013.

The best part of Plan B, and I'm not totally in favor of it, is that it makes the tax cuts permanent, so the democrats would have to actually pass a bill to raise taxes -- we won't have done it for them, like we did the last two times.

The worst part is that it makes the tax code more progressive, validating the concept that people who make money should give it to people who don't. On the other hand, we've had many tax rates over the years, and Plan B would still historically be a good deal for people who make more than a million dollars.

One thing I'd like them to add would be a new tax category for people who run businesses but file personal taxes, so that if the income is really a business income from a small business, it gets taxed at the existing lower rate. Unfortunately, I don't understand the reason that small business falls under the individual tax code and gets hit with individual taxes, so I don't know HOW you would re-write tax code to provide them this relief.

The point of Plan B is that it doesn’t solve any problems, it simply removes from the equation the expiration of the Bush/Obama tax rates.

We still have sequestration which was our pathetic attempt to cut spending but which everybody agrees is a bad way to do it. That was the mechanism by which we were supposed to be driven to a real spending cut/tax plan.

And we have the debt limit, which is another change to request more spending ‘cuts’ in exchange for more borrowing authority.

Passing plan B, even if it was signed into law, wouldn’t even guarantee that more taxes wouldn’t be raised in one of these other two negotiations. It would simply be the “republican” way of solving the “fiscal cliff” issue of the expiration of the current tax rates.

The biggest mistake made in 2010 was thinking the sequestration was an equal incentive to democrats and republicans to get a better deal. It might have been, but they scheduled the tax increases for the same time, and the democrats would be GLAD to trade a half-trillion in “cuts” for a multi-trillion tax increase, especially since then THEY can push to reduce the tax rates for the poor people that don’t pay hardly any taxes, and look like heroes, and still get higher taxes from the evil rich people.

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