Taxes Uber Alles

One more entry into the "C'mon, How Could You Not Have Expected THIS?" file.

Sharks swim, eat, and make little sharks. Democrats lie, cheat, steal, persecute, agitate, backstab, betray, and, of course, tax and spend like their hair is on fire.

Case in point:

[Senate] Democrats are trying to make future tax cuts virtually impossible to pass. They've proposed a procedural change that would require 60-vote super-majority to post any tax cut. To put this into perspective, if a super-majority had been required when the Bush tax cuts were passed, they simply would never have happened. Which means the economic growth we experienced as a result of Bush's tax cuts never would have happened and we'd probably be in the middle of a Depression.

Matt Margolis is exaggerating a bit by using the word "depression," though perhaps not as much as you might think given the post-9/11 stock market crash, 2005 hurricane season, the stagnation of the war, and the nearly $3 a gallon gasoline I'm seeing at my neighborhood filling station. Without the Bush tax cuts, a return to the stagflation of the 1970s would have been a likely possibility.

At any rate, tax cuts are to Democrats what a crucifix is to a vampire. They are genetically compelled to stamp them out, burn the remains, and pave over the mass grave at all costs. So Donks stacking the legislative deck against any more tax cuts of any sort ever again was as inevitable as diarrhea after a Mexican orgy.

But that was just the appetizer. The main course is being served up on the House side of occupied Capitol Hill:

Earlier today, I wrote a post discussing the Democrats proposed budget for next year. I briefly mentioned that this proposal is a sham to the American taxpayer. Having now listened throughout the day to their acrobatic attempts to justify it, I wanted to specifically tell you why it is so bad. Here we go...

Their budget proposes the largest tax increase in American history - The Democrats' budget calls for a tax increase of every tax bracket, slashes the child tax credit, raises the death tax, and reinstates the marriage penalty. And this is just a sampling, there is more. In all, the Democrat's plan will cost taxpayers over $390 billion in the next 5 years.

What is particularly frustrating about this ill-advised action is that the Democrats are blatantly ignoring the economic consequences and fiscal benefits that lower taxes have brought to the treasury the past few years. Revenue has increased in double digit [percentages] the last two years alone because of the economic expansion encouraged by reduced taxation. This revenue growth has been crucial in reducing the deficit.

The Democrats refuse to recognize this, though, and instead they just want to tax us to death. This is a recipe for disaster.

That isn't the whole story by a long shot. Representative Campbell bullet points the rest of the Donks' proposed fiscal infamy:

***Their budget proposes massive increases in spending, expansion of government;

***Their budget proposes no [spending cut] offsets to pay for these increases;

***Their budget proposes no fix to the [alternative minimum tax, a "soak the rich" leftover from the 1986 tax reform act];

***Their budget proposes no entitlement reform plan;

***Their budget proposes no accountability standards [i.e. performance audits, rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, etc.]

I dunno about you, but this elicits little more than stifled yawns from me. Anybody with the slightest familiarity with the American political landscape over the past generation had to know that returning the Democrats to power was going to yield this sort of stubborn, irrational, brain-dead fiscal insanity. It's part of their civic religious sacrament, along with killing babies and spitting in the faces of American soldiers (and giving evangelical Christians the finger). It's as inevitable as lack of public decorum at Huff & Puff. It's what the American people voted for last November.

So, then. Will Senate Republicans paralyze the upper chamber to stop this recession-in-the-making? Will President Bush wield his veto pen like a mighty flaming sword of fiscal justice? Will this become the biggest domestic policy donnybrook of the Bush43 era? Or will the GOP go meekly along and watch the Dems roll back virtually every budgetary gain of the past quarter-century - even if it means going against the expressed will of the people to do what is right and best for them?

The center-right is marching towards its version of Valley Forge. Summer legislators and sunshine partisans are not welcome.