Obama '08?

What georgeob seems to forget is that some of the legislation that the GOP stopped were formerly "their" legislation. How can they now claim it was based on "principal?"

July 29, 2010
SENATE REPUBLICANS BLOCK BILL SUPPORTING SMALL BUSINESSES.... It seems like the kind of bill that should pass pretty easily. As the job market continues to struggle, Democrats have proposed a package to aid small businesses, including tax breaks, new incentives, and an attempt to expand credit through a lending program that utilizes local banks.

Today on the Senate floor, it had 59 supporters and 41 opponents, which means it failed, and the entire effort is in jeopardy.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) failed to break a weeks-long GOP filibuster of small-business jobs legislation and was forced to scramble to figure out his next move after Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) bitterly attacked his handling of the bill Thursday. [...]

But Snowe's attack on the Senate floor -- in which she accused Reid of performing "political theater. It's not about legislating anymore" -- clearly caught Reid and other Democrats off guard and forced the Democratic leader to make a last-ditch effort to salvage the bill.

(For the record, the final vote was technically 58-42, but only because Reid had to switch his vote for procedural reasons. Every member of the Democratic caucus opposed the GOP filibuster, and every Republican voted to kill the bill.)

In a display that can best be described as insane, Senate Republicans demanded all week that the chamber act on the small-business-incentives measure, and not waste time with measures like campaign-finance reform. But this morning, when the small-business package was ready to move, Republicans balked.

To hear them tell it, GOP senators aren't against helping small businesses -- at least not explicitly -- but they're filibustering to get more time for more votes on more amendments to the bill.

In other words, Republicans have gone from complaining about the bill not coming up sooner to trying to drag out the process out.

So, the good news is the bill isn't dead, at least not yet. The bad news is, Republican senators are acting like spoiled children, in the hopes of eating up valuable pre-recess calendar time, making it impossible for the Senate to do anything else with its limited schedule. The energy bill is in trouble anyway, but by playing games with small businesses, making any progress on energy is looking even less likely.

Olympia Snowe was especially embarrassing this morning. Her argument was that the Senate needs to act quickly to help small businesses -- which is why she's supporting the filibuster to prevent a vote on helping small businesses.

What a ridiculous mess.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

It began around lunchtime Wednesday, when Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders requesting an 8 p.m. speech next Wednesday — a time that coincided with a previously scheduled Republican presidential debate.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), citing parliamentary and logistical “impediments,” sent a letter back that urged the president to come instead on the next night.

Democrats charged that the speaker was out of line and that presidents are always given deference in scheduling speeches to Congress. A Boehner spokesman countered that the White House “ignored decades — if not centuries — of the protocol of working out a mutually agreeable date and time before making any public announcement.”

Hours later, the White House capitulated, saying the president “welcomes the opportunity” to address lawmakers next Thursday.

I'll give you one and that is the debt ceiling. However the Republican opposition is based on our now much higher level of public debt and the unwillingness of the current Democrat administration to even consider entitlement reforms sorely needed to frstrain the medium and long term growth of our public debt.

Simple arithmetic, however, tells us that a budget deficit and the concomitant increase in debt can result from either higher spending or lower revenues. And indeed, lower revenues are responsible for about half the increase in debt since 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Since 2001, the national debt has increase $11.8 trillion. This resulted from a $6.2 trillion decline in revenues and a $5.7 trillion increase in spending. Of the revenue decline, $2.8 trillion resulted from legislated tax cuts and $3.4 trillion from economic and technical factors. On the spending side, almost all of the increase was legislated, with $2.4 trillion of it coming between 2001 and 2008.

Despite the significant contribution of tax cuts to the national debt, Republicans argue that higher revenues are off the table in the debt limit negotiations. In a May 16 floor speech, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the assistant Senate minority leader, made this fact clear in no uncertain terms. Said Kyl, “When we are talking about how to get the budget better balanced, how to reduce our deficits, we should not be looking at the revenue side or the taxing side; we should be looking at the spending side.”

Since liberals are not destroying anything... blah, blah, blah

That is demonstrably false.

The graph also shows that tax cuts do not create jobs. Something the GOP keep reminding us that it does create jobs. When?

cicerone imposter wrote:

The graph also shows that tax cuts do not create jobs. Something the GOP keep reminding us that it does create jobs. When?

Absolute nonsense ! The chart shows only the unstated assumption made by the unnamed preparer about future tax revenues - it doesn't "prove" anything about the relation between taxes and regulation and future economic activity & expected tax revenues.

It's not unnamed - it says right on the chart that it was 'prepared by CBPP using CBO data.' That stands for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

You are correct, though, that the chart - like any chart - doesn't prove anything about tax cuts and jobs. But, we don't exactly need a chart to show that tax cuts don't create jobs, do we?