Seriously. If you believed that the stand to not increase any taxes was going to lead to a permanent extension of the Bush tax rates, you are an idiot.
I don’t think you are idiot. The argument was that conservatives would not vote for anything BUT a full extension of all the tax rates, and therefore would force the democrats to pass the tax increase, and therefore they would own the tax increases.
That is what happened — in the house anyway, where a majority of the republicans voted against the bill.
There were only two outcomes possible:
- The conservatives compromise on some set of tax rates higher than the expired Bush rates
- The conservatives refuse to compromise, and a set of tax rates supported by democrats will pass.
The 3rd option, continuation of the existing Bush tax law, meaning all the tax rates reverting to their year-2000 level (adjusted for inflation), was never going to happen, because it was clear the democrats had enough support from republicans to keep taxes from going up for most taxpayers.
So if you thought that by holding out, we’d get taxes increased for everybody, you would also be an idiot.
When you control only 1/2 of the legislature, and don’t have the presidency, and current law includes a huge tax increase (meaning you can’t stop it by simply not passing something), and a majority of the people oppose your plan, it is impossible to get everything that you want.
So you either compromise, or let the other side do what they want. We essentially chose the latter, although frankly given that we ceded control, we did better than I would have expected.
I think we could have gotten the highest tax bracket set higher, and I think we could have included real spending cuts, if conservatives would have voted for the bill with the tax increase. But they wouldn’t, and so we had no bargaining leverage, and we were stuck with what we were stuck with.
Now we’ll see if that strategy worked. The democrats own the new tax rates. I don’t see how we make them pay for that, but we’ll see.
RINO begone!