It Taxes The Imagination

Or in this case, it's imaginary Democratic tax increases from Republicanland. Exra Klein:

The new Republican line is that there's a “Democrat tax hike" on the way. And it's a big 'un: "An unprecedented $3.8 trillion increase" that will affect -- and this is their bold and underline, not mine -- "every American who pays income taxes!"

To understand what's going on here, you need to go back 10 years to the passage of the Bush tax cuts. In order to maximize the size of the cuts, Republicans had to minimize the influence of minority Democrats on the package. So they chose to run the bill through the reconciliation process.

But that posed some challenges. Budget reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit. In fact, it specifically existed to decrease the deficit. That's why one of its rules was that you couldn't use it to increase the deficit outside the budget window. Republicans realized they could take that very literally: The budget window was 10 years. So if the tax cuts expired after 10 years, they wouldn't increase the deficit outside the budget window. They'd also have the added benefit of appearing less costly in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, as the CBO duly scored them as expiring after 10 years, which kept the long-range budget picture from exploding.

In other words, ten years ago Bush and the Republicans actually did everything they accused Obama and the Democrats of doing on health care in order to get GOP tax cuts for the wealthy through reconciliation.  Then they waited, figuring the Democrats will now have to keep all the tax cuts or risk losing the American political landscape forever...or make massive spending cuts and do the same.

Pretty good plan.  After all, almost half of Americans now believed Obama signed the TARP bank bailout into law, not Bush.  If Americans can't remember who was President in 2008, what makes you think they remember who it was in 2001 that wrecked out economy with a deficit double whammy of trillions in tax cuts and trillions in Medicare drug spending?

Does anyone think the Village is going to correct the ignorance?  I didn't think so.