Boehner And Grover Agree: Letting Bush Tax Cuts Expire ‘Would Be Raising Taxes’

Source: TalkingPointsMemo.com

Grover Norquist has walked back his claim to the Washington Post that allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire would not count as a tax increase, and now the Speaker of the House suggests Grover's views are neither here nor there -- he opposes letting even some of the Bush tax cuts to expire.

"I believe that would be raising taxes," John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters at his weekly Capitol press briefing.

So that's not going to happen. "I've never voted to raise taxes, and I don't intend to," Boehner said.

In an official statement, Grover echoed Boehner. "(Americans for Tax Reform) opposes all tax increases on the American people," he said.

Any failure to extend or make permanent the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, in whole or in part, would clearly increase taxes on the American people. In addition, the failure to extend the AMT patch would increase taxes. The outlines of the plans are deliberately hazy, but it appears that both Obama's Simpson-Bowles commission proposal and the Gang-of-Six proposal dramatically increase taxes on the American people.

It is a violation of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge to trade temporary tax reductions for permanent tax hikes.

Read more: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/boehner-and-grover-agree-letting-bush-tax-cuts-expire-would-be-raising-taxes.php?ref=fpa

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Well, so much for that.

signed some nordquist's oath to NEVER vote on raising taxes. sounds rather cultish to me too.

GOP is representing the people who didn't elect him to the office he doesn't hold. The fact that unelected Grover Norquist controls an entire political party proves that the GOP has a secret evil hidden agenda.

A cult? It seems more and more occult. ;-)

:eyes:

He should be hitting Republicans repetitively and hard on the baseless, hypocricrital, nonsensical insistence on making temporary tax cuts - which helped cause the fucking TRICKLE DOWN DEPRESSION - permanent - and for calling NOT makiing them permanent a Godamned tax INCREASE. This is a beautiful opportunity to point out how the Corporate Lobbyists are duplicitous. They lie their fucking asses off!

When Obama chooses to NOT call them on this kindof thing it only encourages these bastards!

Why is this dorkwad calling the shots? They should tell him to go Cheney himself.

It's either that or he has photos of all the House Repukes having sex with sheep...

an outside peg they can hang their hat on and show their loyalty to oaths they sign.
P.S. He lives in North Dakota; hasn't he been punished enough?:puke: :puke:

Of course, she was a 1/2 a guv

What kind of power does he hold?
I really don't get why these people are so afraid of the little punk.

He has access to money and support that they need to be re-elected...did you really think that it was the voters who decided?

Let's face it, most republican voters are idiots who are easily led down the primrose path...the facts don't matter, reality doesn't play any part in their decision process, and the cognitive functions of their brains can be shut down with words like God, guns, war, and abortion. Most would choose to starve to death before allowing any democratic idea to become reality, even if it would make their lives easier. And the remainder really believe that one day they'll be as rich as Mr. Moneybags, so making sure that taxes remain low is smart thing to do.

Yard Gnome.

The Koch money is strong with this one. He's nothing but a corporate pimp . . . how he holds the strings to someone's political career is still beyond me . . .


. . . given that he's a yard gnome who talks like Brainy Smurf with a head cold.

Dolt!

It amazes me how any rationally minded person could actually believe that letting tax cuts expire constitutes a "tax hike". :banghead:

I've seen a lot of strange things.

I suppose that if letting the tax decrease expire isn't an increase, then if we cancel most of the yet-future not-quite-a-tax-increase but just let them rise by 95% of the future non-continuation of current taxes we'd have to say they'd go up, which would constitute a tax decrease.

Much like the proposed Social Security plan which decreases the benefits by making them higher than they currently are. It takes a special kind of deixis to refer to an increase as a decrease and a decrease as an increase. Or a stand up comic.

I have a fairly simple rule: I consider "increase" and "decrease" to be deictic. Just as "come" makes implicit reference to the speaker's location, so "increase" and "decrease" make reference to the current baseline. When we talk about entitlement benefits and taxes we're not talking about actual amounts of money but rates that are contingent upon whatever is necessary to secure the benefits or whatever is taxed.

In other words, if the taxes increase from current rates that's a tax increase; if they decrease it's a tax decrease.

Otherwise imagine this: The tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2012. Instead, in 11/11 Congress passes a law such that they increase not 100% of what they're now set to go to but only 50%. Similarly, they project what OASI benefits will be in 2014 and in 11/1/11 pass a law setting them to increase to only 50% of that.

I'd say that they're going to increase; I take "now" as my reference point. I suspect you'd say that since taxes and OASI benefits are decreased from a future, hypothetical point that they actually decreased. Or maybe you'd take a different future, hypothetical point as your baseline and say that they're still increasing. Hard to know.

We can do the same thing with unemployment or nearly anything else, call things an increase or decrease by comparison to some hypothetically posited value. I've always thought that this is fine for evaluating a theory, to compare reality with projection. I've never really considered the alternative.

"Hike" and "cut" I use, but consider to be mildly loaded terms. We never call a tax increase we like a tax hike (unless we don't like who it's applied to--never hike taxes on us, but certainly hike the taxes on the wealthy parasites). "Cut" is a bit less loaded, I think.

This has gone beyond idiocy into pure madness. The so-called Bush tax cuts shouldn't even be part of the national debate anymore. The fact that they still exist is indefensible.

people how we got into this REPUBLICAN DYSTOPIA.

You say: "They want to make permanent the very tax cuts that helped caused the TRICKLE DOWN DISASTER. Republicans refuse to learn the lesson, shifting the too much of the tax burden from the wealthiest to the middle class reduces over-all demand for the products companies want to sell. This kills economic growth and job creation. But they will NEVER LEARN THIS LESSON, AND WE ALL SUFFER FOR IT!

I stopped calling them the Bush tax cuts as soon as Obama agreed, yeah I know his excuse about unemployment and such, to renew them. At that point, he owned them.

oh that's right a big fat zero on jobs from this stuff to make gardens grow!

:sarcasm:

Basically, they always intended them to be taken as permanent, never temporary?

well, in the Repukes' eyes maybe but not O'Neill's nor Greenspan's.

Grover and all of BushCo will go down as the worst of the worst 100 and 200 yrs. from now. The country is in shambles already---just think about the children and grandchildren starting life with a tax bill in the tens of thousands :grr:

Obama wants to raise taxes, they don't.

The original intent was that they expire. If they expire it is by the will of Dumbya and the Congess that passed the bill. Therefore, if you want to play the raising taxes meme, George W Bush is raising your taxes.

Granted, Obama extended them, but chnaged nothing else. The expiration wsa delayed, but it's still Bush's expiration.

So, GOP, it's YOUR tax increase. You don't like it? Pass legislation that permanently lowers them. You haven't done that so quit your whining and projection and do something about it. This bitching and moaning while sitting on your thumbs is getting old.

If not, I do. I really, really do.

He's the penultimate argument against the existence of a benevolent gawd.