Boy is it Cold Out

Better not try that global warming line on me this week. It's hard to get warm this week.

I'm not really very interested in the stuff going on in the Lame Duck session in Washington. It's sort of surreal that they can't get something as seemingly simple as extending the tax rates for 2011.

The thing that's a bit puzzling about the heated rhetoric on the topic comes from the Democrat side, who keep saying Republicans are holding up tax breaks for the middle class by insisting on massive give-backs to "millionaires and billionaires".

A couple things interesting about that argument:


First, the fact that nobody's talking about giving anybody an actual tax cut - not middle class or millionaires. All they're fighting about is whether or not to keep the existing tax rates in effect.


Second, my first-grade arithmetic tells me that 200 thousand is about 800 thousand short of 1 million. So how exactly are they defining a millionaire?

At least the GOP's message is simpler. Keep the tax rates the same permanently.

The only problem with that is the "permanent" idea. It seems to me Congress can no more make tax rates "permanant" than keep it from raining in DC in April.

I'm a bit puzzled by the Democrat rhetoric, embodied by some overwrought woman I caught on MSNBC the other night. Her impassioned speech decried this "massive handout to the rich, while so many middle-clase Americans are suffering".

Huh? Is she suggesting that keeping the top income tax rate at 35% instead of increasing it to 40% (OK, 39.6%, if you must be precise) is going to somehow cause millions of unemployed Americans to starve to death?

Unless she's suggesting a linkage between that 5% tax increase and the extension of unemployment benefits past 99 weeks. The only problem is that nobody has suggested earmarking those tax revenues for that purpose.

Otherwise, how is it that having people who make more than you pay more in taxes or not pay more in taxes affect your well-being one way or the other? And I haven't even moved into the fact that tax policy affects behavior of the taxed, which means it's unlikely the projected income to the government expected from this tax increase will materialize.

Probably the most disappointing aspect of the argument is that our partisan leaders have so little respect for the intelligence of their constituents.

Extend the tax cuts or don't. Besides the rhetoric, I think both parties know how it will impact the economy.