If I understand correctly, that means taxes should still be about 1% lower than they were during Clinton.
I love how every time a temporary tax cut expires, we call it a "tax hike." I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.
You can claim raising taxes is actually good and not a big deal. That's your opinion and you are entitled to it. You can not claim there was no tax hike - you're not entitled to your own facts.
>>> I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.
Yet no news about any meaningful spending cuts - so far they just kicked the can down the road, as if anything will be different in two months.
Words have connotations too. Frankly, I don't know how to look up connotations so I can't be sure something isn't just in my head. But when I hear "hike", if nothing else "intentional" comes to mind. The automatic expiration of a tax cut doesn't seem to fit.
And I'll reiterate the question posed to Steko: do you call it a "price hike" when a sale ends?
If you were thinking of those tax cuts as permanent, why didn't you and your representatives make them permanent ahead of time?
It's a hike and one I'm perfectly happy to live with. As a commenter at metafilter put it:
Well, it's that or more ice floes to put the old folk on, and the ice industry isn't making any production gains either.
I'm not so sure. If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month. Maybe it's just me, but hike has a very specific connotation that isn't appropriate here.
I dunno.. maybe stop bombing every country on the planet that hates us for our freedom..? Just a thought..
We are in denial that we can have all of the benefits we want and not raise taxes. The choices we have is:
A) Cutting Medicare B) Cutting Social Security C) Cutting National Defense D) Raising Taxes
Everything else is noise. Choose some combination of A-D.
My choice is a 35% cut in C and D to cover the rest.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230418640457639...
Anyone who thinks Social Security is in crisis is misinformed. It's easily fixable for the foreseeable future without touching benefits. Remove the cap for high earners but keep the current benefit limits.
There was a tax reduction in 2010 and there is a tax hike in 2013. How adding word "temporary" to it changes anything?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/opinion/brooks-another-fis...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...
It's frustrating, because the right wants a nice, happy round number to match their nice happy round-number of a tax rate they also think they should have to match the nice happy round-number of what's too big for a deficit.
Meanwhile, there's a society that, by definition of "government" is going to be impacted by what government does or doesn't do---regardless of whatever Randian fantasies one may have.
Being a citizen of Indiana, I am embarrassed to have such people at the helm in this country. It is all [pro-democrat, hate republican] or [pro-republican, hate democrat] with no room for even discussion of what works or not. It's all platform based demagoguery.
