On taxes, still a line in the sand (in which GOP heads are buried)
Still Dodging Reality on Taxes
NYT editorial
Congressional Republicans seem to think they are being flexible on taxes simply because a few of them have grudgingly admitted that some new revenues can be part of the current fiscal negotiations. We’re unimpressed.
No credit is due to a party that has suddenly accepted the obvious when it has no choice, particularly after two years of irresponsibly reducing the deficit only from the spending side. True flexibility means acknowledging that tax rates for the rich have to go up, and then negotiating how much and which ones. But, so far, Republicans have been just as closed to that reality as they have been for years, ignoring both the election results and the plain arithmetic of deficit reduction.
“No Republican will vote for higher tax rates,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, announced on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” recently.
Raising rates on the rich remains so taboo to party leaders that they have twisted themselves into knots to avoid it, coming up with several convoluted alternative schemes to bring in revenue just so they can tell their supporters that rates were left untouched. Most of them involve putting caps on popular deductions like the vital one for charitable donations. Apparently, Republicans are so wedded to keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that they would prefer to hurt charities and the vast nonprofit sector, which would inevitably suffer if donations from the rich could not be deducted.
(More here.)
NYT editorial
Congressional Republicans seem to think they are being flexible on taxes simply because a few of them have grudgingly admitted that some new revenues can be part of the current fiscal negotiations. We’re unimpressed.
No credit is due to a party that has suddenly accepted the obvious when it has no choice, particularly after two years of irresponsibly reducing the deficit only from the spending side. True flexibility means acknowledging that tax rates for the rich have to go up, and then negotiating how much and which ones. But, so far, Republicans have been just as closed to that reality as they have been for years, ignoring both the election results and the plain arithmetic of deficit reduction.
“No Republican will vote for higher tax rates,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, announced on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” recently.
Raising rates on the rich remains so taboo to party leaders that they have twisted themselves into knots to avoid it, coming up with several convoluted alternative schemes to bring in revenue just so they can tell their supporters that rates were left untouched. Most of them involve putting caps on popular deductions like the vital one for charitable donations. Apparently, Republicans are so wedded to keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that they would prefer to hurt charities and the vast nonprofit sector, which would inevitably suffer if donations from the rich could not be deducted.
(More here.)
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