Plan B: A fully baked conservative [cup]cake
Mr. Smith's Insane Cousins Go to Washington
by Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, Dec 21, 2012 6:41 AM EST
Let's get something straight from the start. Plan B wasn't going to lead to any deal anyway. Suppose it had gotten 218 votes last night, instead of being the epic failure that it was. Okay. That would have left Republicans at $1,000,000 on tax rates, with Obama at $400,000. That's still an extremely wide gulf, and if the GOP had to fight that hard to get to 218 on $1 million, what on earth would make anyone think there'd be votes in the GOP caucus for a compromise-on-the-compromise figure like $500,000 or $600,000? No chance.
And that's just tax rates. Plan B also included draconian, not to say outright cruel, cuts to the safety net--ending the child tax credit (Merry Christmas, kids?), permitting the lapsing of certain tax credits that alleviate the tax burden of the working poor. Finally, Plan B lifted the sequester, the across-the-board mandated spending cuts, on the Pentagon only (Merry Christmas, Lockheed Martin!).
In other words, Plan B was a fully baked conservative cake--penalties for poor people, goodies for defense contractors. Then over top of it Boehner tried to apply this icing of a tax increase on two-tenths of one percent of the population, so that the gullible and ever-hopeful establishment press would write that Republicans raised some taxes and see, there's hope.
But even if they'd passed it, the chasm between Obama and the Republicans would still have been vast, and Boehner's unyielding caucus would have signaled that they weren't budging one inch further. I shook my head ruefully yesterday as I listened to some of the credulous reporting on NPR about how Americans should keep hope alive (host Robert Siegel sounded, in fairness, like he knew better).
(More here.)
by Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, Dec 21, 2012 6:41 AM EST
Let's get something straight from the start. Plan B wasn't going to lead to any deal anyway. Suppose it had gotten 218 votes last night, instead of being the epic failure that it was. Okay. That would have left Republicans at $1,000,000 on tax rates, with Obama at $400,000. That's still an extremely wide gulf, and if the GOP had to fight that hard to get to 218 on $1 million, what on earth would make anyone think there'd be votes in the GOP caucus for a compromise-on-the-compromise figure like $500,000 or $600,000? No chance.
And that's just tax rates. Plan B also included draconian, not to say outright cruel, cuts to the safety net--ending the child tax credit (Merry Christmas, kids?), permitting the lapsing of certain tax credits that alleviate the tax burden of the working poor. Finally, Plan B lifted the sequester, the across-the-board mandated spending cuts, on the Pentagon only (Merry Christmas, Lockheed Martin!).
In other words, Plan B was a fully baked conservative cake--penalties for poor people, goodies for defense contractors. Then over top of it Boehner tried to apply this icing of a tax increase on two-tenths of one percent of the population, so that the gullible and ever-hopeful establishment press would write that Republicans raised some taxes and see, there's hope.
But even if they'd passed it, the chasm between Obama and the Republicans would still have been vast, and Boehner's unyielding caucus would have signaled that they weren't budging one inch further. I shook my head ruefully yesterday as I listened to some of the credulous reporting on NPR about how Americans should keep hope alive (host Robert Siegel sounded, in fairness, like he knew better).
(More here.)
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