OFF THE CLIFF!

[Teatownclown]

This is great and makes perfect sense:
http://thelastword.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/19/12837776-submit-designs-for-off-the-cliff-campaign

And so The Last Word "Off the Cliff" campaign begins, and we need your help. We're looking design ideas for #OffTheCliff campaign buttons.

Congressional Democrats are going to need courage to do this because it's a bold strategy and boldness isn't exactly their style. (No offense.) So we've decided congressional Democrats should all get buttons made and slap bumper stickers on their cars saying "Off the Cliff" so that when Republicans see the Democratic cars in the House and Senate garages they'll start to think, 'maybe the Democrats are serious this time.'

We know it sounds bat crap crazy to go off the cliff, all Thelma and Louise-style. It sounds totally reckless, it sounds downright Republican to have a legislative strategy that says, 'hey, let's just go off the cliff — neat!' That was the tea party strategy in the House by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. This cliff is different, and it's the only way to restore sanity and fairness in taxation.

If Congress and the president do not agree on $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction by New Year's Eve then budget cuts amounting to $1.2 trillion will go into effect on January 1, and half of those cuts will be in defense spending – which would trigger an extreme chain of events.

Lawrence broke it down the importance of cheering on the Dems to do the unthinkable in the latest Rewrite.

[AquaMan]

But we won't need to do that when Rmoney gets elected. A certifiable genious and "did it all by myself" businessman, he will throw us back on course in a jiff!

[nathanm]

Let's be fair. Romney, unlike many of his supporters, is willing to acknowledge the fact that the success of his companies depends on government services.

[Teatownclown]

Shall we go off the cliff? I say forward!

[YoungTulsan]

You mean the only logical solution to massive deficits?  Reduce spending AND raise revenue?  Preposterous!

Seriously though, the fact of the matter is that this drop in the bucket decrease in rate of increase combined with expiration of old tax cuts is just a fiscal fart in the wind, not a fiscal cliff.  And the media has apparently signed on to overselling this?

If a third party ever emerges, it needs to be a collection of positives, not a third list of negatives.

[nathanm]

Some have taken to calling it the "fiscal slope," noting that it will take some time for the spending cuts to filter through to the economy. Boehner and the media are just pissy because the Republicans agreed to a deal that put Obama in the drivers' seat if he won reelection. (I guess the Republicans assumed Romney would win) The fiscal landscape looks a lot more like Obama wants in a post-sequester world than it does the Republicans' vision.

I think it's about 6-12 months too early to raise taxes and cut spending, at least as far as the economy is concerned. We've had a year of reasonably decent job growth, housing is turning the corner, and the discouraged are finally rejoining the workforce. It should be completely self-sustaining in not too much longer, to the point where the government can't really love it up except by driving inflation higher with too much "juice".

Unless the Eurozone completely implodes, that is. They are our second or third largest trading partner, after all.

[Teatownclown]

I don't have a ready estimate of how much capping deductions for those earning more than $250,000 would raise. But you can ballpark it by looking the Tax Policy Center's estimates for capping itemized deductions at $50,000. It would raise $749 billion over 10 years, within the $800 billion that Mr Boehner has previously agreed to. That's also more than the $429 billion yielded from returning the two top rates to their pre 2001 levels. The appeal for Republicans is that no one's rates go up, and the preferential rate for capital gains and dividends is preserved. The appeal for Mr Obama is that it is highly progressive. According to the TPC, less than 1% of the bottom 60% of households would pay more tax while the top 1% would pay 79% of the additional revenue. The average tax rate for the bottom 60% wouldn't change, while it would go up 2 percentage points for the top 1%. It's worth noting that Mr Obama's budgets proposed capping the value of deductions for upper income households at 28%, which would have raised $584 billion over 10 years. Prior to 2001, the personal exemption and itemized deductions phased out for upper income taxpayers; those phaseouts were eliminated by the Bush tax cuts. Mr Obama's budget would reinstate them, raising $164 billion over a decade. (These provisions would raise considerably less revenue if the two top rates did not go up.)

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-tax-deal-2012-11#ixzz2BqsF2Se4

Boehner and Cantor sort of remind me of Thelma and Louise at this point. "Over the cliff on January 1st" is definitely hard core all-in poker.
I might well play it that way myself, but don't see that being Obama's brand or style. 

I'll happily bet anybody even money until Monday that we don't "go over the cliff" on January 1st.

[Townsend]

Simpson-Bowles Fans Once Again Reveal Ignorance of Simpson-Bowles Plan



http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/13/lindsey_graham_loves_simpson_bowles_but_doesn_t_know_what_s_in_it.html

Over the weekend on Face The Nation, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) begged the president to endorse the Simpson-Bowles plan (emphasis added):

"Say yes to Simpson-Bowles, Mr. President. I'm willing to say yes to Simpson-Bowles," Graham said. Graham said Washington needs more revenue, but that the revenue should come from closing tax loopholes and deductions for the rich, not from raising tax rates. "Mr. President, if you will say yes to Simpson-Bowles when it comes to revenue, so will I and so will most Republicans. We can get revenue without destroying jobs," Graham said.
I can never tell if the reason so few people understand the content of the Simpson-Bowles plan is that Simpson and Bowles themselves are dishonest or just extraordinarily bad at explaining their own work, but this simply isn't how the plan works. To understand the math of the Simpson-Bowles proposal you have to understand that they start from the baseline assumption that Obama gets his way on income taxes:

Second, when the Bowles-Simpson plan listed the savings that its proposed policies would achieve, it used a revenue baseline that assumed that the tax cuts President Bush and Congress enacted in 2001 and 2003 would expire for incomes over $250,000 for couples ($200,000 for singles).  After Bowles and Simpson issued their plan (and starting with the budget negotiations of 2011), policymakers of both parties decided to measure revenue changes from a different, "current policy," baseline — i.e., a baseline that assumes that policymakers would extend all of the Bush tax cuts and almost all other expiring tax provisions.
Get it? The way this works is that they start from the assumption that tax rates on the rich go up, and then from that new higher baseline they raise even more revenue through base-broadening reform paired with rate cuts. What's more, of the $2.1 trillion in discretionary cuts they proposed $1.5 trillion have already been enacted.

Summed up, this is another reason for Obama to call John Boehner's bluff. Simpson and Bowles didn't use that baseline for no reason. They use that baseline because they know it's much simpler to get Republicans to agree to a mathematically workable tax plan when you lock that baseline in. Mitt Romney just tried to run an entire presidential campaign based in tax reform assuming the current policy baseline and we saw over and over again that he couldn't make it work. But in terms of affect, both the Romney plan and the Simpson-Bowles plan are the same. You cut raise and broaden the base. Where this gets you numbers-wise all comes down to the baseline. Obama can unilaterally set a new baseline that's more favorable to reform, and he should.

[Townsend]

Poll: If government careens off fiscal cliff, GOP to shoulder blame

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/13/15141771-poll-if-government-careens-off-fiscal-cliff-gop-to-shoulder-blame?lite

If the U.S. government ends up careening off the "fiscal cliff," Republicans in Congress stand to shoulder most of the blame, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
A majority of Americans said in a new, post-election poll that they do not expect President Barack Obama and members of Congress to reach an agreement to avoid the effects of the fiscal cliff, the combination of automatic spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the beginning of the year.

Fifty-three percent of Americans said Republicans in Congress would be more to blame in that instance, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in the days following the election. Twenty-nine percent said that Obama would be more to blame, while 10 percent said both the president and Republicans would share blame.

Those kinds of numbers help set the political landscape heading into the impending fight to resolve the long-running fiscal standoff, which features an emboldened Obama fresh off a re-election victory and a Republican Party looking to regain its footing in Washington after losing seats in the House and Senate in addition to Mitt Romney's White House loss.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill returned to work on Tuesday to begin sorting out these issues and beginning to work on some internal affairs, including choosing their own leadership teams for the next two years.
But just a few weeks separate the U.S. from the onset of the fiscal cliff, as the 2001 Bush tax cuts and the 2010 payroll tax cut are set to expire at the end of this calendar year. On top of that, the automatic spending cuts -- which fall heavily on the defense budget -- will also take place beginning in January unless Congress acts first.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans said in the Pew poll that they would expect the impact of the fiscal cliff to be major, and 70 percent said they expect the fallout from the fiscal cliff to be mostly negative.
The president hosted labor leaders at the White House on Tuesday morning in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations, and Obama will host business leaders on Wednesday. Leaders in Congress from both parties head to the White House for talks on Friday.

Both Obama and Republicans in Congress have begun laying out parameters for those negotiations, and White House press secretary Jay Carney reiterated on Tuesday afternoon that the president would not sign any law extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Obama has instead called on Congress to extend all tax rates except for those in the top income bracket.
(Republicans have called for broader talks that link an overhaul in the tax code to entitlement program reforms.)
The Pew poll was conducted Nov. 8-11 and has a 3.7 percent margin of error.

[Gaspar]

4 years without a budget.

The House has put fourth 3 budget proposals.  The president has offered two budget "frameworks."  The senate has offered no proposals of their own and refused to bring others to a vote.

The can is likely to be kicked to next year.

No matter your political affiliation, the impasse rests on the senate.  They are clearly not doing their job and require replacement.

[carltonplace]

None of the house budgets were serious attempts at legislation...they were political statements.

It's time to walk out of the corners and into the middle and make concessions on both sides. We need to reduce spending (everywhere, not just in "Medicare/Medicade") and raise revenues. We need serious policy discussions instead of idealoguing.

[Gaspar]

None of the house budgets were serious attempts at legislation...they were political statements.

It's time to walk out of the corners and into the middle and make concessions on both sides. We need to reduce spending (everywhere, not just in "Medicare/Medicade") and raise revenues. We need serious policy discussions instead of idealoguing.

I agree, but that is unlikely to happen. 

[Teatownclown]

We need to go off the cliff to enable
the GOP/TEABAGGERS cause of lowering tax rates.
Win win....you don't get it Carl?

[carltonplace]

No, we shouldn't. We should not plunge the country into recession out of spite.

[Teatownclown]

No, we shouldn't. We should not plunge the country into recession out of spite.

What? Why do you think we'd "plunge" into recession? I'm just trying to help GOPeer/Teabagger save face and have a reason to exist in 2014.
They let this cabal mature to this edge after all. They can fall back on "we lowered taxes." This will not make anything worse.


It's now Obama's fault!  http://www.businessinsider.com/the-obama-tax-hikes-that-will-hurt-2012-11
I've heard more whining this week than the past 4 years combined. if you make over $250,000 in California then counting all taxes your rate is closer to %67. Nobody saw this coming? War is hell and it made us poor.