....who supposedly don't - or aren't supposed to have standing to - pay taxes. Or, in other words, welfare through the tax code.
Let me remind all our readers where I come from on the subject of tax cuts: I don't believe in gimmicks, I don't believe in loopholes, and most especially I do not believe in targeting. That's why the term "middle class tax cut" makes my teeth grind. It offends my sense of justice, which grows out of the constitutional concept of equality before the law. If you didn't know or realize that "progressive taxation" was a Marxist concept, the unkillable Donk chimera of their never-ending "crusade to help the middle class" should be a powerful clue. It even drives me nuts when Wayne Alan Root fixates upon it. You want to "help the middle class"? Stop punishing the "rich" - aka the job-creators (not "gentry liberals") - with "progressive taxation," and leave them greater resources (as well as incentivizing the "de-sheltering" of still more capital) with which to grow their enterprises, grow the economy, and generate the blizzard of "good jobs at good wages" that always result as a byproduct of a liberated capitalist economy.
Yes, gentlebeings, I am a flat tax fan, until such time as a miracle on par with Genesis Chapter 1 takes place, we can repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, and get back to the indirect taxation the Constitution originally ordained. Bottom line: if We, The People, are going to be directly taxed by the federal government, everybody - and I do mean everybody - should pay the same singular rate. No tax tables, no federal withholding, no nothing. Declare your income, multiply it by that singular rate, write your check to Uncle Sam, and you're done.
Yeah, it would put us CPAs out of at least part of our business, but I've been effectively blackballed from the accounting profession anyway, so what would I have to lose by standing on constitutionalist principle?
But this story is about the "middle class tax cut" that Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as the Obama White House, were supposedly (and VERY quietly) negotiating over this past summer. In other words, one of the hundreds of pro-growth, pro-jobs bills the GOP House has churned out over the past four years that have died of neglect and dust-bunny poisoning on Harry (G)Reid's desk while he was out squeakily bashing Republicans as "waging war on the middle class". Or, in (G)Reidish, "Koch Brothers! BRAAWWWK!"
Supposedly there was very close to an actual, genuine, by-Barack agreement on this actual, genuine, by-Barack "middle class tax cut," until the little GOP discovery that The One wouldn't sign it unless it was applied to Pedro DePacas from Panama:
Interviews with the key players showed that the two tax-writing panels in the Senate and House had for weeks been making solid progress toward a final tax package that looked like it would include the breaks for low- and middle-income people sought by the president.
Or, in other words, not a "tax cut," middle class or otherwise, but more welfare via the tax code.
But the deal fell apart just as it seemed to be coming together.
The immigration executive order soured the GOP on the tax cuts for the working poor and middle class sought by Democrats. Republicans worried [illegal aliens] targeted by the order would begin claiming the credits in droves. They found a friend in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who reluctantly agreed to drop his party’s demands to extend expiring parts of the earned income tax credit and its companion, the child tax credit.
Evidently because Harry (G)Reid valued anti-tax cut (or "cut") purity more than O valued pandering to his stereotype of the border erasure that all Hispanics are supposed to fervently desire.
Republicans were uncharacteristically perceptive in recognizing that policy tiger trap and averting it. Indeed, it is precisely the sort of bumbling, fumbling, stumbling debacle into which they so often face-plant themselves. But then it was also a poison pill so perpetrated as to enable Democrats to claim, "We tried to give the middle class tax relief, but those plutocratic fat-cat Republicans stood in the way." How blessed for the GOP, and the country, that Red Barry had by that time so thoroughly buried his party in public animosity, distrust, and ill-will - instinctively, even if most Americans couldn't explain the numerous, ample reasons for it - that the Dems' usual tiresome, petty propaganda "gotcha" games were completely drowned out.
For my part, I am baffled by at what point, and by what means, illegal aliens joined the "middle class". Unless the definitional bar of that term has been so subterraneanly lowered that even I, bereft of gainful employment or income as I have been for 451 of the past 457 days, with no end in sight, am now being classified as "rich". Because if that's the case, I wish somebody would inform my bank account, as it continues to not receive that particular memo.
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