A $3.8 trillion tax increase is coming down the pike, folks. America’s tax cuts which can incentivize small businesses to expand and hire more people (thus fulfilling the mission to grow more private sector jobs), or even just to keep our doors open, will expire in four months. That expiration equates to an increase on your tax bill, starting at midnight, December 31.
I’ll keep calling out President Obama and the Democrats until they tell the American people what the plan is to save the incentives – to not allow the mom and pops’ tax cuts to expire. Granted, liberals (including stubborn “fact-checkers” who claim I’m lying about the soon-to-be tax cut expiration) are trying to clobber me for holding them accountable and prodding them toward revealing their intentions (because they’ve had 18 months to publicly propose a plan to stave off the $3.8 trillion tax increase that will soon slam us, but have revealed no plan). If they have a bill to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, let’s see it. Time for them to put up or shut up.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take the word of the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact, who, before moving the goal posts in their second dissembling “fact-check” on the Democrats’ tax hikes, wrote in their original “fact-check”:
There are no formal congressional proposals yet to keep the Bush tax cuts in place, so we don’t have precise estimates from official sources like the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Still, there’s a good bit of consensus on what the tax increases would look like, both if lower rates expired only for high earners and also for all incomes.
And there’s a big problem with this argument, which is that “consensus” means nothing without passing a bill, and especially not without proposing one first. Thanks to Democrats in 2001 and 2003, those bills cutting the tax rates have hard-and-fast sunset provisions that create an expiration date absent of any other action. We are now less than four months away from that expiration date after seven years of seeing it coming, after more than 3 years of Democratic control of Congress, and after eighteen months of the Obama administration. Democrats don’t even have a proposal on the table yet, and the legislative calendar is rapidly shrinking to take action before the expiration date hits. Without action, we will see a $3.8 trillion tax hike across the entire spectrum of earners.
So much for “consensus” without action. PolitiFact is curiously stating that in his 2011 budget, the President mentioned some “plan” to do something about not raising taxes on all Americans. Um, don’t know about you, but I don’t find this general, vague promise of some “plan” all that reassuring. The Left also “plans” to do something about our out of control deficits and high unemployment, and the President “planned” for his nearly trillion dollar stimulus to keep unemployment under 8%. We’ve seen how successful that “plan” worked out. The President’s budget “plan” hasn’t worked out so well either. As the economist Bruce Bartlett explained at the time, the President’s budget – including the tax promise – was never much more than a vague statement of intent. Practically speaking, it was dead on arrival. Even Bartlett couldn’t have known how dead, though, because in the end Congress didn’t even succeed in passing a budget, let alone in taking a decision on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
Bottom line: until we see a formal proposal – an actual bill before Congress – then get ready for that $3.8 trillion hit.
(By the way, the Left sure gets wee-wee’d up when they’re called on something like this, eh? And here I am, thousands of miles away from DC out on a commercial fishing boat, working my butt off for my own business, merely asking the Democrat politicos and their liberal friends in the media: “What’s the plan, man?”, and they seem to feel threatened by my question. So, I’ll go back to setting my hooks and watching the halibut take the bait, and when I come back into the boat’s cabin in a few hours, I’ll log back on here to read their reply. I’ll have succeeded if they’re forced to finally reveal to Americans how they plan to increase taxes, and what they intend to do with our money. In the meantime, I’m catching fish.)
- Sarah Palin, in Homer, Alaska
