The Goat Pen

whine, whine, whine. It's conservative media that is pointing out there folly. Your typical refrain (which usually doesn't fit) absolutely doesn't fit in this case.

Or did you miss that it was the Wall Street Journal editorial's board and Republican members of the Senate who complained about House Republicans

I don't know Hack, even the 1 of your 9:1 says this was stupid...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... on_LEADTop

Oh, how the 9 hates it when the 1 dares to disagree.

As for the WSJ editorial, their point seems to be that the Rs are allowing themselves to be out-politic'ed by the dems. What's new about that? They say that the Senate Rs were wrong to adopt the President's language that he is proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount the benefit.

I disagree. The 9:1 media will paint this however they want. How many times in the past have we seen the GOP propose decreases in the rate of planned growth of certain spending programs, only to have the 9:1 media insist on characterizing it as "cuts" or even "slashing" -- when, in reality, the spending would have still increased over the previous year? The media will almost always try to portray something in the way that helps the left, because the vast majority of them are left of center. This has been shown to be true over and over again.

The bottom line is that the American people want these tax breaks to continue. The Rs want to agree to extend them for a year. Obama and the dems don't really want them at all. So they're stonewalling and begrudgingly agreeing to extend for 2 months. Those are the facts. The media has found a way to make it look like the Rs are the bad guys. No big surprise there. Par for the course.

9:1

1. The American people want these tax breaks to continue, as you said.

2. Boehner and the House Republicans are vigorously preventing those popular tax breaks to continue.

Those are the relevant facts here. Anything else that you and other partisans say to justify it becomes "blah-blah-blah" in the ears of the average American voter. All Boehner's rationalizations just sound like typical political posturing and maneuvering because that is what it obviously is, and is precisely what people can't stand about politicians in general, and congress in particular.

I'm starting to wonder of Boehner and company aren't Obama moles.

The Rs want to agree to extend them for a year. Obama and the dems don't really want them at all.

Wow, this statement makes you sound clueless, and before this moment, I never thought you were clueless. This is the problem when you only listen to one media and one that is so biased that they are willing to lie.

The Obama administration has been very supportive of they payroll tax extension and they originally wanted it extended for a year (as admitted by Boehner). The Republicans orignally were against it. This is known to most Americans, not because of the media but because of the statements of politicians. It was so bad that Norquist (he of the pledge) said that if Republicans voted against the payroll tax extension, that it wouldn't be considered a tax increase. The Republicans held this payroll tax extension up to get an expedited decision on the pipeline, which had absolutely nothing to do with the tax cut. This was a compromise between the Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats (and according to most sources had been signed off of by Boehner in a phone discussion with Mitch McConnell before the Senate vote).

The problem in this case isn't the Dems, or the Senate Republicans, it's the new House Republicans (I saw one Republican analyst laughed that the problem is that Boehner's main vote counter, Cantor, is undermining him all the time). Boehner thought he had the votes, then he found out he didn't.

puterbac wrote:
My definition of working class is if you have a job you are in the damn working class.

Heh. puter - the intractable wordsmith

explains why he's having such gay old time this holiday season

1. The American people want these tax breaks to continue, as you said.

2. Boehner and the House Republicans are vigorously preventing those popular tax breaks to continue.

Geez, Prof, if I wanted to hear the dem party talking points, I just would have turned to CNN, ABC, CBS, (MS)NBC, most of the major news publications in the country, or watched any number of productions in the category of entertainment, including John Stewart, SNL, etc.

9:1 has the situation well in-hand. Take a break and have a cup of coffee or something. You've probably got a long, busy day of brutal, deathmatch-style hand-to-hand combat with maximum security prisoners on tap.

"The Obama administration has been very supportive of they payroll tax extension and they originally wanted it extended for a year (as admitted by Boehner). The Republicans orignally were against it."

You must think I'm clueless if you think I'm going to let you spin that without calling bullshit. Remember when these were called the "Bush tax cuts"? That was back when the dem spin was that they were irresponsible and would damage the economy. Not surprisingly, the 9:1 media happily went along with parroting the "Bush tax cuts" mantra, because they thought they could help the dems by hurting the Rs. You notice how almost no one is still using the term "Bush tax cuts"? That's because folks like you would love for everyone to think that somehow Obama and the dems are carrying the water for tax cuts. The truth is that if the dems hadn't fought the Rs tooth and nail, these cuts would have been permanent and we wouldn't even be having this debate right now.

So go rewrite history for someone who might be fooled.

You must think I'm clueless if you think I'm going to let you spin that without calling bullshit. Remember when these were called the "Bush tax cuts"? That was back when the dem spin was that they were irresponsible and would damage the economy

Well, I didn't, but now I do. This wasn't the Bush tax cuts. IT's the payroll tax cuts, passed under the Obama administration.

Might be beneficial to watch various news outlets

It's part of the compromise to extend what used to be called the "Bush tax cuts" -- before the dems and the 9:1 media realized that people actually like the "Bush tax cuts" and it was a losing strategy for them to continue opposing them.

Here's a link to the history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts

It's under the heading entitled "Extension of Bush tax cuts".

"On December 6, 2010, President Barack Obama announced a compromise tax package proposal had been reached, centered around a temporary, two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts..."

Nice try, though.

Owlman wrote:Might be beneficial to watch various news outlets

Heh...I would be shocked if I am not a lot more diverse in my selection of news sources than you are -- profoundly shocked. I even occasionally make a point to pay attention to what the 1 is saying.

Try again. The payroll tax cuts are not part of the Bush tax cuts and were passed under this administration. Calling them the Bush tax cuts is just ----- misleading.

And yes, you'd probably would be shocked.

Right now, you are like the the House Republicans, trying to say something to get you out of the corner they painted themselves in to. We know you confused the Bush tax cuts with the payroll taxes. Keep spinning though.

McConnell finally speaks: http://mobile.politico.com/iphone/story/1211/70782.html

In a blow to House Republicans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has called on the House to pass a two-month payroll tax extension — while pushing Democrats to negotiate a full year extension of the tax break.

McConnell’s statement came just 30 minutes after Speaker John Boehner pledged that he and House Republicans weren’t backing down from their push for a one year extension of the tax, which expires Dec. 31.

McConnell also asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to appoint conferees to negotiate a long term version of the bill.

“The House should pass an extension that locks in the thousands of Keystone XL pipeline jobs, prevents any disruption in the payroll tax holiday or other expiring provisions, and allows Congress to work on a solution for the longer extensions,” McConnell said in a Thursday statement.

McConnell’s move would seem to undercut Boehner, who stood with his top leaders and a handful of other Republicans earlier this morning to pressure Democrats to come back to the negotiating table.

“The fact is, we can do better,” Boehner told reporters at a news conference Thursday morning. “Americans are still asking the question, ‘where are the jobs?’ It’s time for us to sit down and have a serious negotiation and solve this problem so that American workers don’t see their taxes go up in January.”

President Barack Obama, congressional Democrats and many Republicans both in and outside Congress have called on House Republicans to pass the Senate’s version of the payroll tax cut extension, which lasts two months.

Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, one of Boehner’s eight picks to the conference committee that Democrats have yet to join, said on CNBC that Republicans could consider a three-month extension of the payroll tax holiday as a compromise.

“If [the Senate] went to three months and did the first quarter, we might have made sense of that,” Camp said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “If we can’t do a year, at least do a quarter, something that matches up with what employers have to report.”

Though Boehner also noted that businesses report their taxes on a quarterly basis, he didn’t answer whether House Republicans would be open to a three-month extension and instead again called on Reid to appoint conferees.

“We need people to sit down and work with,” Boehner said. “We’re not going to sit here and negotiate with ourselves.”

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, rejected any plan aside from the extension that the Senate passed on Saturday with an 89-10 vote.

“That’s it,” Durbin said of the Senate bill on MSNBC. “It’s the only option.”

Jonathan Allen and Tim Mak contributed to this report.

Now that quoting the WSJ is so popular, here's more.....


Democrats have spent years arguing that private lenders created the housing boom and bust, and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac merely came along for the ride. This was always a politically convenient fiction, and now thanks to the unlikely source of the Securities and Exchange Commission we have a trail of evidence showing how the failed mortgage giants turbocharged the crisis.

That's the story revealed Friday by the SEC's civil lawsuits against six former Fannie and Freddie executives, including a pair of CEOs. The SEC says the companies defrauded investors because they "knew and approved of misleading statements" about Fan and Fred's exposure to subprime loans, and it chronicles their push to expand the business....


The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress's affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC's lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, "Desktop Underwriter." Fannie did so as part of its "Say Yes" strategy to "provide more 'approve' messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted."

The SEC also shows how Fannie led private lenders into the subprime market. In July 1999, Fannie and Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Home Loans entered "an alliance agreement" that included "a reduced documentation loan program called the 'internet loan,'" later called the "Fast and Easy" loan. As the SEC notes, "by the mid-2000s, other mortgage lenders developed similar reduced documentation loan programs, such as Mortgage Express and PaperSaver—many of which Fannie Mae acquired in ever-increasing volumes." ...

Owlman wrote:Right now, you are like the the House Republicans, trying to say something to get you out of the corner they painted themselves in to. We know you confused the Bush tax cuts with the payroll taxes. Keep spinning though.

You are accusing someone else of spinning?!

lmao

!

The bills commonly referred to as the Bush Tax Cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003. Neither dealt with a social security payroll deduction of any duration or any amount.

In December of 2010, those Bush tax cuts were extended for two years, and additional measures (provisions) were added to make an all-encompassing new bill, and one of those new additional measures included a 30% reduction in percent of wages paid to Social Security (see IR-2010-124), dropping the effective 6.2 rate down to 4.2, and was set to expire at year-end 2011. This was accompanied by another measure adding $56 billion in new unemployment insurance benefits (something else that had nothing remotely to do with the 2001 and 2003 bills). The official name: The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010.

Hope this helps!

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Increase FICA, decrease income tax.