Nearly 10 Years Ago Today, The U.S. Began Borrowing Billions To Pay For The Bush Tax Cuts

[midnight]

"As debates about deficit reduction continued to be heavily tilted toward cutting spending, which threatens to undermine a fragile recovery, rather than raising revenue from those who can afford it, it’s important to remember the budgetary impact of the Bush tax cuts.
Nearly 10 years ago today, on August 1, 2001, the Associated Press reported that the Treasury Department was tapping $51 billion of credit in order to pay for the budgetary cost of the first round of Bush tax cuts’ rebate checks. The AP reported at the time that Democratic Party opponents of the tax cuts worried that they’d return government budgets to “red ink“

:http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/07/20/273795/ten-years-ago-bush-tax-cuts/

Just remember this every time the deficit talk turns to shared responsibility...

[bigwillq]

1. Now they're the Obama tax cuts (nt)

[Blue Meany]

2. We lower taxeson the rich and then they put some of this money

into government bonds. Thus we pay interest to them on what they should have paid in taxes in the first place. What could be fairer?

[Skink]

4. Atleast they bought Government bonds.

let's hope some of them invested heavily in Greece.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Bells and whistles should have gone off at that time. There wasn't enough

in Clinton's surplus to finance unnecessary tax cuts. I could see the roles reversed in 2001 where democrats could have refused to raise the debt ceiling without concessions. But 2001 was 9/11 and it seemed "unpatriotic" not to give * whatever he wanted.

[Historic NY]

6. They were but no one listened...even when they were dipping

into the SS Trust fund.

[midnight]

7. Not only that, but then they started to war with other countries, and they didn't have enough

in the budget for that either...

[Schema Thing]

5. marking n/t

[Igel]

8. People like polls.

So most of the population wants some sort of tax increase to help reduce the deficit. This gets cited constantly. People like citing it.

At the same time, you get a majority of the respondents saying either budget cuts/no tax increase and "mostly budget cuts with some tax increase." A minority accounts for "half and half", "mostly tax increases" or "only through tax increases." This doesn't get mentioned nearly as much. People don't like citing it.

This is completely consistent with claiming the poll says most people want to reduce the deficit by having some tax increases. It does. But there's no majority for half/half or mostly tax increases. Can't get that conclusion unless you play creative games with the margins of error.

Now, I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that I'm no stranger to citing polls that I like and overlooking the obviously incompetent, crappy polls that are utterly wrong--yea, treasonous--and have the temerity to actually claim things I don't agree with. But the fact that people are confidently citing a conclusion drawn from a poll but not another conclusion entailed from the very same data from the very same poll? That's new.

Or maybe I just didn't notice before. Mistakes happen.

On edit:
Mistakes do happen. Fixed "debt" to "deficit." Opps. Uh ... oops.

[midnight]

9. Standard and Poor’s basically forced this by saying that they would downgrade if there wasn’t a $4

trillion deficit deal in the next 90 days.

The claim is that this has been caused by political leaders attaching the debt limit to a deal on reducing the deficit, and the inability to reach an agreement, the political stalemate, has led the markets to lose confidence.

But this is absolutely crazy. The market was up 2% last week. 10-year Treasuries are at 2.96%. There’s no difference between this week and last week in terms of the country’s deficit problem. This is about perception, and it doesn’t seem to even be about the perception of the actual market. It’s about the perception of someone at Standard and Poor’s. The rating agencies, which played a major role in the financial meltdown, has just up and put a gun to the head of the country and demanded austerity in the middle of a jobs crisis. Are you kidding me?

Washington certainly deserves blame for attaching a huge lift of deficit reduction to the debt limit, which is so routine but which has such adverse consequences. But this is completely irresponsible on the part of not just DC but the rating agencies. The word “collusion” comes to mind, with the elites of the world demanding that their tax cuts be paid for with someone else’s money.

On top of this, you have both the President and Harry Reid vowing never to agree to a short-term extension of the debt limit, wanting instead something that pushes the debt limit through the Presidential election. Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement that at today’s meeting, “The President restated his opposition to a short-term extension of the debt ceiling, explaining that a short-term extension could cause our country’s credit rating to be downgraded, causing harm to our economy and causing every American to pay higher credit cards rates and more for home and car loans.” Reid was more explicit:http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/07/23/the-standard-and-poors-play-credit-rater-pushing-congress-into-big-deficit-deal/#comments

Are we being turned into Greece in the heat of the summer?