Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Ellijah Cummins calling it like it is - "a manufactured crisis"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc_tv-morning_joe/#43924799

He came on my radar during baseball hearings. Just love the guy. The last honest man in Washington. Hopefully I am never proven wrong.

 

Drudge has been saying that for weeks.

 

So have I. Cummings is the first person in a position to do something that I've heard call it manufactured.

 

Well, yeah. That's what defines a compromise.

Do you want his to craft a bill that would just receive the unanimous support of House Republicans? He could do that. That would be easy.

Instead, he's willing to put forward bill that won't garner the support of the right wing.

If the Democrat(ic) Party wanted to compromise, they'd also abandon their wing and meet Boehner in the middle.

And this is what pisses the left off. It's not a football field. There is no 50 yard line. You find the middle where you find it.

Everyone acknowledges that the "Tea Party" is to the right of the middle. The problem is, the left is shocked to find out how far away they are from the middle. They lack the self awareness to realize they ideological equals (or maybe opposites, as it were) of the "Tea Party".

And, President Obama, with his demands for tax increases is the leader of the far left.

 

Again, tax rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years.

Wanna live in your tax-free nirvana? Catch the next boat to fucking Somalia.

Some of us like living in, you know, a civilized society.

 

There hasn't been a "far left" in this country since the trial of the Chicago 7.

 

Then a good 60 percent or more of the country is far left.

The way the "middle" has been defined previously in our lifetimes, the Tea Party is not right of middle. The Democratic Party is right of middle. Hell, Richard Nixon and even Ronald Reagan are lefties the way the term is currently defined.

 

And some of us think success should be rewarded.

It's what's fueled our growth and innovation for two centuries.

 

The obscenely low tax rates have only been around for the last 20-30 years. The previous 170-180, the rich -- and the country as a whole -- seemed to do OK. Now, at least the rich are doing OK ...

 

Really? 170 or 180 years?

Please tell me when the personal income tax first went into effect.

We used to raise money for the Federal Government on alcohol taxes and tariffs. That's why Prohibition was so costly.

We also used to spend a fuck load less.

 

Alright, if you're going to suck the debate down into mid-19th-century triviata and try to compare the agrarian economy of 150 years ago to the world of today, fine, I will stipulate that the personal income tax has not been around for 200 years. I don't know when it came into existence, but since it doesn't mean jack in this debate, I don't care to look it up.

The basic point remains: This economy hummed along quite spectacularly with rich people and corporations paying far higher rates than they are now. The largest portion of the debt comes as a result of giving tax breaks to those entities for the past 25 years. (The NYT had a graphic a couple days ago showing that the Bush tax cuts account for more of the debt since 2002 than both wars combined.) And now the same group that for decades has supported the explosion of the debt, largely through these tax cuts, is saying we must not add to the debt in any way, shape or form.

 

How dare you want to look at BOTH sides of the balance sheet. That's what I simply cannot understand...people who want to punish the rich for their success while looking to reward those in our society that have not accomplished anything but figuring out how to cash a welfare check and how to spend food stamps. You know, if you buy a 25-cent piece of candy with a $1.00 food stamp you get 75 cents back in real money. Do that enough times, or have enough kids do it for you, you can afford to buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of wine?