Politics, Government & Public Policy: December 2012 Archives
House Republicans may have kept their majority in November but they seem incapable of out-maneuvering President Obama.
Speaker John A. Boehner's effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the "fiscal cliff" until after Christmas. With his "Plan B" all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.
However the primary reason that Boehner appears to be failing is that the media mostly ignores that fact that the House has already passed numerous bills that would avert the fiscal cliff by reducing spending without increasing taxes, and the Democrats have continuously refused to consider those proposals. Instead of negotiating against himself and proffering ever-more-taxy proposals Boehner should have stood pat. Now the Republicans all look like fools.
The blue states just re-elected President Obama, and the one concrete point that he campaigned on was to raise taxes on "the rich". So, let's raise some revenue!
But suddenly liberals are having second thoughts, and our guess is that this is because residents of high-tax Democratic-run states are about twice as likely to take advantage of tax loopholes as taxpayers in low-tax states. For example, 44% of Connecticut filers itemize their deductions, but only some 21% of North and South Dakota residents do.One tax writeoff in particular illustrates the point: the deduction for state and local income taxes. This allows a high-income tax filer who pays, say, $20,000 in state and local income taxes to deduct those payments from his federal taxable income.
Because the highest federal tax rate is 35%, the value of the state and local deduction is enormous for high-tax states. If President Obama succeeds in raising the federal tax rate to 39.6%, the value of those deductions rises to nearly 40 cents on the dollar. This deduction certainly eases the pain of New Jersey's 8.97% top tax rate, or Hawaii's 11%.
Cry me a river. The Left wants tax increases and they won the election, so let's do it. Close the "loopholes" all those "fat-cat" blue-staters use to avoid paying their "fair share".
Michigan workers now have the right to join a labor union or not at their own discretion, and the rent-seeking union barons aren't happy.
As thousands of angry union members shouted their opposition outside the state Capitol in Lansing, the Republican-controlled legislature completed work on two measures to ban unions from requiring workers to pay membership dues. Gov. Rick Snyder (R) then signed them into law Tuesday evening.The "right to work" effort illustrates the power of Republicans to use state legislative majorities won in 2010 to pursue their policy preferences, even after losing a bitter presidential election.
The defeat is devastating for organized labor, which for decades has been waging an uphill battle against declining membership and dwindling influence.
But it also strikes at the roots of a Democratic Party that relied on unions for financial support and to marshal voters for President Obama's reelection.
Right-to-work laws are a clear enhancement to liberty: workers can choose to join or not. Democrats are angry because unions are used to forcefully extract money from workers which is then funneled to Democrat campaigns. President Obama understands the stakes.
"You know, these so-called right-to-work laws, they don't have to do with economics. They have everything to do with politics," Obama said.
If your political power depends on limiting others' freedom then maybe you're on the wrong side. No one should be forced to join a union against their will.
Unfortunately it appears that the Republicans don't think Missouri can follow suit despite their supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature.
Missouri House Republican Speaker Tim Jones, of Eureka, says passing a similar law would require strong leadership from the governor and the support of the business community. Republican Senate leader Tom Dempsey, of St. Charles, says numerous senators support a right-to-work law but not enough to overcome a veto.Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon previously has called the idea a backward step.
