When did it become appropriate to call tax cuts anything other than what they reallty are, a vote to increase the federal deficit and commit future generations to overwhelming debt that will diminish American prosperity?

1978

God fucking damn it.

I am so fucking sick and tired of this tax issue being used the way it's been used for 30 fucking years. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

You cannot run the fucking government without money! It people want their social secuirty check, and their medicare, and their schools, and unemployment insurance, and pot holes fixed and if they people want to go on military advertues building an emprire then you have to PAY FOR IT. It doesn't pay for itself with monopoly money.

Until someone finds a way to replace money as the currency of commerce and capital then you will get TAXED to fund the fucking government.

Democrats need to stop being pussies and tell it like it is. The RICH get tax breaks while the working class gets an increase in local and state taxes because of shortfalls! These are the same fools who vote for the GOP because they think they will be millionaries one day and will get the 100K cut in his taxes--against his own interests all because he falls for religious opium.

I am so sick of this fucking country. It is beyond repair--the population is just so fucking dumb.

Technically, if not extending temporary tax cuts is a tax "increase," then not extending temporary spending is a spending "cut."

By this logic, every temporary spending program throughout American history that no longer exists is now a cut.

So I guess if we're going to be blamed for tax increases, we should get credit for "cuts" this year for opting not to spend on World War 2, World War 1, the Civil War, the Black Hawk War, etc., etc.

Yay us for all these spending cuts!

Not sure I buy that logic. The only way your argument works is if the pre-cut level of taxation can somehow be classified as the "natural" level.

The fact is that there is no natural level of taxation only practical levels determined by debt and those programs the public and legislators decide can best be handled through governmental means rather than private sector means.

Since Republicans (at least in theory) err on the side of private sector solutions, their natural taxation level is lower than Democratic taxation levels. This isn't to say that Republical levels are better than Democratic levels, just that for those who view private solutions as always superior to "big government" ones then  their natural level will be lower than those who are more supportive of "big government" solutions.

For those "small government" folks, the cuts in Bush's first term were the return to what they view as a more naural level which means that "not extending" those cuts is in fact a tax increase.

It's not just spin or semantics, it's an entirely different world view.

Just e-mailed asking her to differentiate between "temporary" give backs.  But this whole tax cut deal in 2001 was obscene and was "bi-partisan" with Baucus being the co-chair of Finance.  "Bi partisanship is just another name for pro-multi-national corporations. What will Baucus do now that he's chair again?