Presto, change-o! At the beginning of the year, we were sternly lectured that huge tax increases were absolutely necessary to confront our looming debt crisis. America was driven to the edge of the “fiscal cliff,” ostensibly producing business panic that explained a fair measure of Barack Obama’s permanent economic malaise, by the President’s refusal to budge an inch from his demands for those deficit-fighting tax | Read More »
Once upon a time, liberals were somewhat principled in their pursuit of a utopian dirigisme. Sure, they always liked to play a bit of class warfare, but they fundamentally believed in taxing everyone. After all, if you want a cradle-to-grave government-run society, it’s got to be purveyed by the broad populace. There simply aren’t enough rich people to raise the requisite funds for a rapacious | Read More »
Throughout the tax debate, we heard righteous indignation from both parties regarding the need to close up special interest loopholes in the tax code. Yet the special interest loopholes were the only items preserved in the cliff tax bill. The entire package of over $40 billion in corporate subsidies and green social engineering was taken from a Senate Finance Committee Bill, which unfortunately, was supported | Read More »
I will not try to convince any conservative that the final fiscal cliff deal that passed the Senate with only a few dissenting votes and needed Democratic votes to pass the House with a divided GOP caucus is a good deal, nor that it is the best deal available under the circumstances. It is, however, important to remember that this was a deal negotiated under | Read More »
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to break down the Fiscal Cliff deal, what it does and doesn’t address and the business community’s reaction.
Read More »Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No questions, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. [Animal Farm, last paragraph] Republicans were ushered into power in 2010, buoyed by | Read More »
Well, we really stuck it to the rich at 1:39 in the morning. Whew, now we can breathe a sigh of relief. The 40 Republicans who voted for Obama’s stimulus bill had to swallow hard voting for over $100 billion in new spending just in 2013, but at least those of us who are not super rich won’t see our taxes increase this year. Oh | Read More »
Last night, without any legislative language, the Senate Republicans and Democrats voted to raise taxes. They did not just vote to raise income taxes. They voted to raise the payroll tax on all Americans. This will hurt small businesses. Ironically, this plan generates less revenue than even John Boehner’s Plan B option. But both options, as I have long maintained, were only about breaking the | Read More »
In a move all too reminiscent of the passage of the ever unpopular ObamaCare, last night the Senate voted 89 to 8 to approve the so-called “American Taxpayer Relief Act” (H.R. 8, as amended). The deal was negotiated by Vice President Joseph Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. You can read the 157 page bill here. It is very unlikely that any Senator actually | Read More »
Surprise surprise, they have a deal to avoid the politicians’ cliff. Who didn’t see that coming? Here’s an enigmatic riddle for you: what happens when Republicans publicly obsess about the degree of tax increases they are willing to accept without a commensurate demand for spending cuts? You get tax hikes and no spending cuts! In fact, we will spend even more as a result of | Read More »
It feels like yesterday when John Boehner was bragging how he got 98% of what he desired from the deal negotiated to raise the debt ceiling in August 2011. Yet just 17 months after Obama was granted a $2.1 trillion debt limit increase to preserve his reelection, we have breached the new ceiling. In just 519 days, we’ve burned through $2.1 trillion in debt, for | Read More »
Conservatives within the Republican Conference should kill the compromise plan for the fiscal cliff. For years, squishy folks on both sides and lots of think tankers have told us that we needed a “balanced” approach to solve our debt and deficit problems. A “balanced” approached included both tax increases and spending cuts. In other words, a “balanced” approach looked a lot like the so called | Read More »
The Fiscal Cliff is a problem. We typically blame people not named us when problems occur. It’s easier and less painful than solving the problem. Here the problem is that the current US President and Congress (The US Senate in particular)* have both spectacularly failed in their management of the national fisc.
If we decided to solve America’s fiscal issues, it wouldn’t hurt to mine some historical data. Since 1950, the United States Government has averaged expenditures proportional to 19.61% of the same year GDP with a standard deviation of 2.25%. Our government has booked revenues equivalent to 17.65% of same year GDP with a standard deviation of 1.26%. If both events occurred at random, we’d have a 6.07% chance of a Federal Budget actually balancing if the spending and the revenues were determined at random.** This would suggest that we’ve set up a systemic and nasty spending problem despite pious insistence otherwise.
Read More »One of the biggest problems on Capitol Hill these days is that the leaders of both parties are calling all the shots without input from the rest of Congress until the end. Certainly there comes a point when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but the purpose of the legislature is to legislate and the legislators cannot do their job because of their | Read More »
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to hand out some awards for the less than stellar performances of Mitt Romney, Sandra Fluke, the European Union, the Republican Party. We also thank all of you for listening and wish you a Merry Christmas.
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