Tag: bush tax cuts

President Obama pitched his American Jobs Act before a joint session of Congress Thursday evening, pleading his case with proposals clearly designed to win bipartisan approval and demanding action with tough campaign-style rhetoric. The nature of the talk, a desperate soft and hard sell, underlined the fact that Americans are stuck hoping the most frustratingly partisan government in modern history can summon the wherewithal to finally address the job-killing recession that has plagued the country for years and that shows no sign of letting up anytime soon.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is gunning for Colorado Freshman Representative Cory Gardner with a bold gas-station advertising campaign that highlights his votes in support of oil industry tax breaks and deregulation, on one side, and his votes to prune Medicare, on the other. Ads will appear atop gas pumps in the Fourth District, capturing constituents as they watch their price-of-purchase climb. The ad text underlines the contrast between individual taxpayers sweating out the economy and the mega-profiting non-tax-paying corporations like Chevron and Exxon that are hiking gas prices in a recession without fear of political response.

Warren Buffett, an icon of American super wealth, skewers the anti-tax political theocracy dominating Republican politics in a New York Times op-ed today. GOP justifications for refusing to raise taxes for billionaire Americans at a time of record deficits are preposterous, he writes, adding that taxes have never stopped wealthy people from investing. He points out that Clinton-era tax rates were clearly more effective in adding jobs than the slashed rates of the Bush years. He adds that most of the mega wealthy only pay taxes on investment income, whereas lower- and middle-class Americans pay payroll taxes, too. He says the game has been rigged in his favor by the country's billionaire-friendly Congress and that the country's fiscal policy is unethical and absurd.

Prominent Christian pastors in the United States who have dedicated themselves to serving the poor and most vulnerable citizens don't believe in trickle-down economics and they don't believe the problem of poverty should be left for churches to address. More than 4,000 of those pastors signed an open letter to that effect addressed to President Obama and the members of Congress, urging them as they hammer out a federal budget not to make poor and hungry Americans bear the burden of reducing the nation’s deficit. More than 95 pastors and clergy members in Colorado signed the letter, which appeared in Politico Wednesday.

Income tax cuts for the wealthy will liberate the U.S. economy to create jobs and generate revenue and shrink the deficit. That line has become a policy standard on the right and a talking point repeated on stumps all across the nation. It is a cornerstone of the GOP Ryan Budget plan being pushed on Capitol Hill. Yet analysis and statistics and personal anecdotes pile high and deep against that tack as an effective real-world national economic policy. GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who led the state down a path toward deficit swampland, is the latest to try to rework history to suit the tax-cut narrative. As Dave Weigel at Slate points out, Pawlenty's recent big economic speech twists and turns and makes a dead stop at the Bush years, when "tax cuts for the wealthy" national budget policy went into full effect and revenues plummeted and the deficit skyrocketed and the economy withered.

A new Bloomberg News poll indicates that nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe that legislators should reach a compromise on the federal budget in order to avert a government shutdown.

Colorado’s congressional delegation late last night split in approving President Obama’s compromise bill to extend the Bush tax cuts in full for two years and federal unemployment benefits for one year. Republican Mike Coffman joined Democrats Jared Polis, John Salazar and Betsey Markey in voting for the final bill, which passed 277-148 after the House first rejecting an amendment to change the estate tax provisions of the agreement.

Colorado Governor-elect John Hickenlooper announced Friday that he supports the controversial deal President Obama struck with Republican leaders this week where Democrats would support extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in a time of recession and ballooning deficits in exchange for Republican support for an extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. The Colorado delegation in DC has been torn on the deal.

It seems that President Obama’s impromptu press conference on Tuesday to sell the compromise he worked out with Republicans on extending the Bush tax...

Taking heat from the left as well as from moderate Democrats like Colorado's Mark Udall for cutting a deal with Republicans to extend tax...