Thursday, November 29, 2012

"A complex exegesis"

As Josh Marshall accurately describes:
official Washington is now deep in a complex exegesis of the Norquist anti-tax pledge. Is it eternal? Is it limited to a single term? If a tax rises in the forest but no one voted to rise it, did it really rise?
If only there were some way to ask the voters about their opinion on the matter!

5 comments:

nyb said...

I just think its funny that Republicans are being blamed for the so-called "Fiscal Cliff"... Didn't everyone agree in 2011 that if the Super Committee couldn't get a bill passed, then sequestration would happen? I seem to recall our President signing that bill.

I would be 100% on board with returning to Bill Clinton Era Tax Rates. If we also return to Bill Clinton Era Spending (adjusted for so-called BLS "inflation")

TableTopJoe said...

I seem to remember that the "fiscal cliff" was in response to the debt-ceiling fiasco in the summer of 2011.

What precipitated that? I can't remember. Was that Obama and the democrats?

nyb said...

It seems to me that it was a compromise between Republicans and Obama and the democrats. In exchange for raising the ceiling, they built in a safeguard to ensure that cuts occurred if congress didn't act. Politics is compromise. The president even said that even though not everything he wanted was in the bill, he'd sign it as a "down payment".

Compromise to a liberal means conservatives changing their positions to match the liberal one, not meeting halfway, like that compromise...

TableTopJoe said...

NWest, your point is well taken. However, I can't help but ask how many times has the debt ceiling been raised in the history of our country? Even if we only count back as far as 1980, how many times has the debt ceiling been raised? How many times has there been a non-White House party demanding concessions in order to refrain from forcing the U.S. government to default on its debts? It's especially galling when there is a reasonable argument that a lot of the spending that the Republican party is bitching about is due to legislation that the Republican party passed.

And as to your snark about conservatives changing their positions to match the liberal one, I don't know which world you live in. Individual mandate? Republican idea. Low income-tax burden? Republican idea. "Starve the beast"? Republican idea.

Can you tell me a bon a fide liberal position that has become policy since the Great Society?

I can keep listing Republican policies... and their results. Wanna play?

TableTopJoe said...

Furthermore, as to the "safeguard," what is the safeguard? Is it to inflict enough pain on the country to force the congress to act? Is the "fiscal cliff" there because without a crisis, Congress won't act, and as such we must create an artificial crisis?

Seriously, this is hurting America. I wish they would stop.