Deficit Fraud Jon Kyl: ‘You Should Never Have To Offset’ Tax Cuts

[Joanne98]

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has been one of President Obama’s most vocal critics on the budget deficit (most of which is actually attributable to the President’s predecessor). “The Obama administration is spending trillions of dollars we do not have on things we do not need,” Kyl has said.

But today on Fox News Sunday, Kyl threw his concerns about the deficit out the window when discussing tax cuts. Kyl said Congress should not allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, but when host Chris Wallace asked, “How are you going to pay the $678 billion to keep Bush tax cuts for the wealthy?” Kyl wouldn’t answer. And in fact, he went so far as to say tax cuts should never have to be paid for:

WALLACE: We’re running out of time, so how are you going to pay $678 billion just on the tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year?

KYL: You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

Watch it

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/07/11/kyl-tax-cuts/

[theothersnippywshrub]

1. Another republican welfare queen.

He wants all of his government benefits for free.

[Igel]

2. What a strange post.

Kyl misunderstood the question, probably out of inattention or slow-wittedness, but was in turn misunderstood, out of willfulness or, again, slow-wittedness. Yet both misunderstandings are needed for the basis of the TP blurb.

Kyl has the presupposition that you need to raise taxes to "pay for" a tax cut. That's odd. It's also not in line with how "pay for" is widely used.

"Pay for" in the original question probably also meant "reduce expenses." If you have a balanced budget and cut taxes by 10% you can "pay for" them by reducing the budget by 10%. Hence the entire logic of pay-go, where you can "pay" for something by increased revenue or rededicating funds already budgeted.

But this presupposition is really quite clear in his response, where Kyl has his own definition and it's hard to miss this fact. Most of it talks about raising taxes to cover increased expenses and not raising taxes to cover a tax decrease. But then the final sentence is to be interpreted apart from that context and "offset" is taken to reflect the likely meaning used in the question.

Odd use of shifting definitions. Don't like building an allegation on an obvious fallacy, or at least that obvious a fallacy. It allows the pragmatic inference that that's the best argument there is.