Liberals cut down to size

Liberals cut down to size

Michael Graham
Boston Herald
December 16, 2010

Enough!

You can have your own politics, my liberal friends, you aren’t entitled to your own facts. And your claims about the Obama/GOP tax deal are pure, fact-free fantasy.

Yesterday morning I endured watching a fertilizer-filled conversation on Fox 25 with Rep. Stephen Lynch, who hit every Pelosi talking point: The bill is full of “tax cuts,” in particular “tax breaks for the top 2 percent” of income earners. “We’re borrowing $855 billion from the Chinese . . . to finance these tax cuts [for the rich]” Lynch claimed, and he rejected the idea that the original Bush tax cuts had any stimulative effect.

Instead, he supports the “best way to create jobs is to increase unemployment benefits” theory of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Where to begin?

First - show me the tax cut! Anyone’s tax cut. The tax deal Democrats keep claiming will “cut taxes for the rich” doesn’t cut taxes at all. It keeps rates the same. Unchanged. As in, “not lower than they are now.”

Of course I realize that tax rates are scheduled to rise, but not letting them rise isn’t a “cut” anywhere outside Washington. I’ve never seen an advertisement that said “C’mon down for big savings at the ‘We were going to raise prices but decided not to!’ sale!”

Congressman Lynch, I will happily donate $1,000 to the Fisher House charity in your name if you can show me a single dollar in income tax cuts for any tax bracket in the “tax cut” plan you oppose.

Then there’s the nonsense about how letting people keep their own money will “cost” $855 billion. As Rep. Barney Frank and other liberals put it in a letter to Pelosi, we can’t afford “to add billions more to our national debt in tax cuts.”

Quick question: When you get that big loan from China, how much of that money are you going to send to Bill Gates? Or Shaq? Or any other “rich” taxpayer? The answer, obviously, is “none.”

Tax cuts don’t cost money. Spending costs money - you know, like the massive $1.2 trillion omnibus “I don’t care who won the midterms” spending monstrosity dumped on the American people yesterday. That’s where the borrowed money from China is going: to “maple syrup research” in Vermont, and a million-dollar memorial to deceased Democrat hack John Murtha and $8 million in pork to the Ted Kennedy boondoggle on Morrissey Boulevard.

And as for those evil Bush tax cuts “costing us” billions, federal revenues increased 14.5 percent in 2005 and 11.8 percent in 2006, the fastest rise since 1981.

Where did that money come from? From “the rich,” those layabouts living it up on $250,000 per in places like Boston. Well families earning 250K aren’t “millionaires.”

Not only that, but their share of the tax burden actually went up - not down - under President Bush. According to the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of earners paid 37.42 percent of the federal tax bill in 2000. By 2007, they paid 40.41 percent. The top 5 percent of earners - $128,000 or more - already pay more than 60 percent of the federal tax bill, while the bottom 50 percent pay just 3 percent.

And Massachusetts Democrats want that 60 percent to go even higher? How high? Seventy percent? Eighty? Why not have every successful business owner just send his paycheck straight to Washington and wait for Congress to send him an allowance?

Democrat: A Latin word for “lousy at math.” <--------

I'm directing this at those in the opposition political camp here. I would like to hear from them.

I would like to hear how one can call keeping a tax rate the same a "tax cut."

I'd love to hear how one explains how keeping tax rates the same "costs" our federal government a single dime.

I'd especially be interested in hearing how you feel about the Democrats on the Hill fighting for maintaining "tax cuts" for the "middle class" when it was practically yesterday that they were saying that the Bush tax cuts were only for the "wealthy." Or how you feel about these Democrats calling for the extension of a tax policy that they had for years said was responsible for destroying our economy.

And of course, I'd like to know how you view the statistical reality of just how much of our national tax burden the upper income earners are actually carrying on their backs - despite the Democrats constantly telling us that the "rich" aren't paying their fair share.

Surely someone in the opposition camp has a reasonable explanation for the positions the Democratic Party has staked out on these issues.

I welcome that explanation and subsequent debate on it.