RochesterConservative.com

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• 1 GoBucs99 // Feb 23, 2009 at 9:31 am

  In his first budget, President Obama apparently plans to keep his campaign promise to let the Bush tax cuts expire for Americans making over $250,000 a year. And just as during the election, Republican leaders are falsely claiming that Obama’s proposal constitutes a tax hike on small business owners. This time, it is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell echoing John McCain and Joe the Plumber in spreading the lie.

  McConnell’s myth-making came during an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” (WMV and QT videos here.) There, he fired the first salvo against President Obama’s plan to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who need it least. Claiming that “a vast majority of American small businesses pay taxes as individual taxpayers,” McConnell thundered:

  “I don’t think raising taxes is a great idea, and when our good friends on the other side of the aisle say raising the taxes on the wealthy, what they are really talking about is small business.”

  Of course, they’re not talking about small business. As CNN concluded in October, “fewer than 2% of small business owners would pay more under Obama’s plan.”

  As it turns out, McConnell is merely parroting the same fraud now that John McCain tried to perpetrate then. Last fall, then Republican presidential candidate McCain attacked Obama, wrongly asserting, “The small businesses that we’re talking about would receive an increase in their taxes right now.” As it turned out, McCain’s human shield and faux small business owner Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher will receive a tax cut, and not an increase, under the just passed Obama stimulus package.

  But in case there was any doubt the Republicans’ deception on the point, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center quickly put it to rest. As the Obama campaign correctly claimed, 98% would see their taxes decline or remain the same:

  Even using the broad definition of small business that McCain likes, very few owners would see their own taxes rise.

  That’s because the lion’s share of taxable income comes from a small number of wealthy businesses. Out of 34.7 million filers with business income on Schedules C, E or F, 479,000 filers fall into the top two brackets, according to an analysis of projected 2009 filings by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

  The other 34.3 million – or 98.6% – would be unaffected by Obama’s proposed rate hike.

  Of course, the complete falsehood of a statement is no barrier to Republicans uttering it. Now as in 2001, Republicans wrongly claimed that the estate tax led to the loss of family farms. When President Bush blasted opponents who say “the death tax doesn’t cause people to sell their farms” with a mocking “don’t know who they’re talking to in Iowa,” neither Hawkeye State farmers nor researchers could name one. As the New York Times concluded eight years ago, “Almost no working farmers do, according to data from an Internal Revenue Service analysis of 1999 returns that has not yet been published.”

  But just because it’s a lie, doesn’t mean Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party won’t keep saying it.

  http://crooksandliars.com/

• 2 rochester_veteran // Feb 23, 2009 at 10:23 am

  Obama is really into the class warfare crap. People shouldn’t be unfairly punished for being successful and that’s exactly what Obama is doing. People that make $250,000 or more are the people that run businesses that create jobs for the rest of us.

  I’m totally against this.

• 3 Leavingroch // Feb 23, 2009 at 11:35 am

  Go ahead, raise the taxes… we will watch as it fumbles, crashes and burns and then the republicans will win again and FIX everything. .

  I see let Obama have almost everything he wants, I just pray most of us hang on long enough for us to vote in the right people again..

  If history repeats itself and it seems to in this country, then we should be due another Reagan soon

• 4 GoBucs99 // Feb 23, 2009 at 1:11 pm

  “we will watch as it fumbles, crashes and burns and then the republicans will win again and FIX everything”

  Yes. Like they “fixed” that surplus that Clinton left when he left office. The way they “fixed” the economy over the last 8 years.

  Brilliant!!!

• 5 rochester_veteran // Feb 23, 2009 at 1:42 pm

  GoBucs99 ,

  There was never a surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration.

  The Myth of the Clinton Surplus

  The US budget has been in deficit since 1969 and every year since, including the Clinton years.

  http://www.federalbudget.com

• 6 GoBucs99 // Feb 23, 2009 at 2:36 pm

  Luckily Americans had enough of Republicans “fixing” things for the last 8 years and they showed it at the polls.

• 7 rochester_veteran // Feb 23, 2009 at 2:53 pm

  Yeah, Obama won the election, but it was no mandate:

  

  Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election win was a mandate:

  

  I do think that leavingroch will be proven correct that four years of a Barack Obama Presidency will set the stage for a conservative to sweep the 2012 election, much as Reagan did after the Carter Presidency.

• 8 phantomlord // Feb 23, 2009 at 3:48 pm

  Let’s revisit the last 8 years…

  Yep, Bush was generally an unmitigated disaster fiscally. I don’t think you’ll find many conservatives that will argue that point.

  From 2000-2006, the House was controlled by Republicans. They screwed up and were thrown out for it. Again, most conservatives won’t argue that point.

  From 2006-2008, the House was controlled by Democrats. They’ve blamed Bush even though the last 2 years, they controlled the federal purse strings. Not a dollar could be spent without their authorization of it.

  The Senate is a bit more complicated…
  Jan 3 2001 til Jan 20 2001: 50 Republican, 50 Democrats, Al Gore the deciding vote (Democrat control)
  Jan 20 2001 til Jun 6, 2001: 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats, Dick Cheney with the deciding vote (Republican control but Democrats demand equal control over Senate)
  Jun 6, 2001 til Nov 5, 2001: Jim Jeffords leaves Republican Party, Democrat control
  Nov 5, 2001 til Jan 3, 2007: Paul Wellstone dies, Republican control
  Jan 3 , 2007 til present: Democrat control

  During that stretch, the GOP never had more than 55 Senators and the body was split near evenly the entire time… given filibuster rules (and boy were there filibusters for the whole 8 years), the Senate didn’t do much itself.

  So… to sum up… over the last 8 years,
  Republicans controlled the purse strings in the House for 6. Democrats controlled them for 2.

  Republicans marginally controlled the Senate for about 5.5 years. Democrats marginally controlled the Senate for 2.5 years.

  Bush couldn’t find his veto pen for 6 years.

  But the failures of the last 8 years are ALL the Republican’s fault, despite the Democrats owning at least 25% of it, right?

  A little less partisanship and a little more honesty perhaps?

  Kinda like how you ignore that Clinton’s “surpluses” were only in effect after Republicans took control of Congress and Clinton’s own budget projections in 1993-1994 (with a Democrat Congress) forecast deficits as far as they could see.

  nobody is going to say the Republicans did a good job fiscally from 2000 on and I’ll question the sanity of anyone who does. Their mistake was acting like Democrats. Actual Democrats taking over will return us to the economies we saw under Carter, LBJ and FDR.

• 9 HowardRoarke // Feb 23, 2009 at 5:50 pm

  Yeah, “surpluses in name only”, LOL. Not only that, Clinton plugged holes in the budget with Social Security monies. Brilliant, indeed!

  Imagine what the federal deficits would look like now if Clinton had gotten his way in ’96, after he vetoed welfare reform-twice!

• 10 rochester_veteran // Feb 23, 2009 at 6:02 pm

  HowardRoarke posted:

  “surpluses in name only”

  

  Good one, HowardRoarke!

  

• 11 GoBucs99 // Feb 24, 2009 at 9:45 am

  Obama’s Summit and the Myth of Republican Fiscal Responsibility

  To the displeasure of many on both sides of aisle, President Obama on today is hosting the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House. While some Democrats question the timing of Obama’s expenditure of political capital on Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement reform, obstructionist Republicans are ridiculing the event even as they hype the myth of Republican fiscal discipline.

  And a myth it surely is. Far from the deficit hawks of Republican legend, the modern Republican Party from Reagan forward devastated the U.S. treasury, leaving mounting debt and hemorrhaging red ink for as far as the eye can see.

  Of course, you’d never know it listening to the grousing from some of President Obama’s Republican guests. On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declared the summit “sobering up here and beginning to rethink the kind of debt that we’re laying on future generations.” And New Hampshire Senator and aborted Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg turned on his would-have-been boss, sneering:

  ”It can either be a nice press event. Or it can be a substantive event. History tells us it will be the first. We’ve had these meetings before. There’s always a lot of people willing to point out the problem.”

  As the history of the past 30 years shows, those people “willing to point out the problem” are called Republicans. The ones doing something about it are called Democrats.

  As the chart above shows, the national debt under president Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 exploded as a percentage of GDP, interrupted only by the all-too-brief fiscal sanity of the Clinton years. And to be sure, the budget surpluses of the late 1990′s seem like a distant memory.

  That didn’t prevent the AP’s Liz Sidoti, who famously presented John McCain with a box of doughnuts during a 2008 AP campaign forum, from faithfully regurgitating last week Republicans’ talking points about a return to their tall tale of the GOP as heroic guardians of the national purse:

  “The GOP’s strategy of emphasizing its so-called bedrock principles – restrained spending, limited government and deep tax cuts – comes as the party works to rehabilitate itself after eight years of Bush’s leadership and rebound from back-to-back elections that saw Republicans lose their grip on Congress and the White House.”

  Unfortunately, the Republicans’ fiscal rot didn’t begin with George W. Bush, but with Ronald Reagan. It was the legendary Gipper whose financial recklessness and tax-cutting fetish came to define the modern GOP.

  The numbers tell the story. As predicted, Reagan’s massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous “rosy scenarios.”

  Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe (a fact conveniently forgotten in the conservative hagiography of Reagan), the Gipper nonetheless presided over a doubling of the American national debt. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history.

  For his part, George H.W. Bush hardly stemmed the flow of red ink. And when Bush the Elder broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge to address the cascading budget shortfalls, his own Republican Party turned on him. While Bush’s apostasy helped ensure his defeat by Bill Clinton, it was Clinton’s 1993 deficit-cutting package (passed without a single GOP vote in either house of Congress) which helped usher in the surpluses of the late 1990′s.

  Alas, they were to be short-lived. Inheriting a federal budget in the black and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, President George W. Bush quickly set about dismantling the progress made under Clinton. Bush’s $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the yawning budget deficits he produced.

  Like Reagan and Stockman before him, Bush resorted to the rosy scenario to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009. Before the financial system meltdown last fall, Bush’s deficit already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By this January, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

  And so it goes. The Republican Party of No decries President Obama’s deficit spending urgently needed to rescue the country from the economic cataclysm over which they presided. While relatively minor adjustments to the 1980′s grand compromise are needed to assure the long-term solvency of Social Security, the GOP will no doubt balk at the serious health care reforms required to avoid the looming Medicare train wreck.

  Regardless, the Republicans will continue to point the finger of blame for the endless sea of red ink they themselves produced. As Vice President Dick Cheney famously said in 2002, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

  http://crooksandliars.com/node/26208

• 12 Leavingroch // Feb 24, 2009 at 10:17 am

  Funny how the democrats “question” the timing but if it is a republican you use a different word.

  Becareful BUC your slip is showing.

  Hey Buc it would be more impressive it were your own thoughts, instead of copy and paste.

  and yes I did say FIX everything…

  Lesson from my household finances, you don’t thrown money at a problem, it just turns into a bigger problem… you don’t borrow and spend to fix an economic downturn… imagine, you have no job and no way to pay bills so you BORROW more to pay the bills?? Makes no sense.

  and really? You believe that Obama will cut the deficit in half, you mean the one he just tripled?

• 13 GoBucs99 // Feb 24, 2009 at 10:51 am

  “Hey Buc it would be more impressive it were your own thoughts, instead of copy and paste.”

  Right. So if I just said that Reagan increased the deficit and that republican fiscal responsibility is a myth you would just accept that? Sorry. I debate with facts and numbers not opinions. That is a key difference between me and uh…some others.

  I post a link to facts and charts that show that republican fiscal responsibilty and Reagan are myths. Then you post your “expert opinion” to try and contradict my facts.

  I notice you didn’t address any of the actual content of the article. Which tells me 1) you didnt even bother to read it cuz you know everything or 2) you read it and completely missed the point.

  And I would have thought that being the person who said “If history repeats itself and it seems to in this country, then we should be due another Reagan soon” at the beginning of this thread, you would have read it and responded to the content rather than attacking me and then running off on some tangent about your household as if the economics of our country is no different that your household economics.

• 14 Leavingroch // Feb 24, 2009 at 11:47 am

  Actually simple is best Buc… big bills (stimulus package) that spend alot are not going to work. so yeah economics are like my household accounts.. everyone always says don’t spend what you don’t have. and if you ar borrowing to pay your debt, you don’t go out and buy a new car.. much like this “bill” does.

  I didn’t bother with YOUR facts because YOU didn’t bother with PL’s facts. and you speak of VENOM in the other thread toward Obama, what in the world did you print here?? VENOM toward anyone republican.

  You are antagonistic and closed minded.

  DID you address the fact that in 30 short days Obama out spends Bush?? He triples the deficit and then SAYS he will halve it… that will still be MORE deficit then what he started with… yet he is the good one and the Republicans are the bad ones..

• 15 GoBucs99 // Feb 24, 2009 at 12:14 pm

  Your the one who taughted Reagan as some kind of fiscal savior. I simply posted an article which shows that, and repub rhetoric about “fiscal responsibility” to be false.

  And to compare your household economics to the economics of our country is simplistic at best.

  Obama can’t fix the mess Bush made out of our economy overnight you know.

• 16 Leavingroch // Feb 24, 2009 at 12:21 pm

  He can’t fix it at all with the policies he is employing..

  Simple is BEST… don’t you get it.. spend and borrow and spend and borrow isn’t going to work. Simple, tax cuts, cut in spending… duh.. simple. that is what will work.

  and really… address that the One is spending more then Bush ever did, address that he will “halve” it and it will still be higher… please how does that fit into to “Fixing” it?

• 17 GoBucs99 // Feb 24, 2009 at 1:29 pm

  He is spending. While I don’t agree with all of it I do agree that we need to make some investments here in our country. We need infrastructure improvements. We need to go after alternative energy. Tax cuts won’t do it. Not that I don’t value your opinion, you’ll forgive me if I take the word of ECONOMISTS over your houshold budgetary experience.

  Btw…why weren’t you bitching about us pouring a $1 trillion into rebuilding Iraq? (which is a huge scam that we have been bilked out of millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars).

  Now maybe you will address that your savior, Reagan, was no savior at all and that he actually created massive budget deficits with his tax cuts.

• 18 Leavingroch // Feb 24, 2009 at 2:30 pm

  Not my savior, I have only ONE savior, that would Jesus Christ.

  Are we going to go round and round? you said economists,, many ecomonists are saying this is not going to work, that it didn’t work before and it aint gonna work now.. and the stock market is proof of it.

  When experts now say if you need your money (in your 401k) in the next 5 yrs, pull it out NOW.. but if you need it in 20 yrs you are ok, maybe… that kinda tells me BAD BAD… it aint getting better. This is after the passing of the “stimulus” package. This package has not given any confidence to anyone but the sheep.

  I agree SOME things are needed I disagree on HOW.. and never did I agree that the banks and GM.. and big companies need it.

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