President Barack Obama appears to have struck a deal with Democratic and Republican leaders that extends all the Bush-era tax cuts while also continuing unemployment benefits for another 13 months.<\/p>\n
Liberals are furious because they want rich people to be taxed more and saw this as an easy win that Mr. Obama tossed away.<\/p>\n
After all, most Americans agree that people earning more than $250,000 a year should<\/em> see their taxes go up.<\/p>\n But setting aside partisan score-settling, the deeper truth about this deal is more troubling.<\/p>\n It shows that both sides are going to continue to fight for their special interests and narrow constituencies, even if it bankrupts the country.<\/p>\n Democrats wanted an extension of unemployment payments, and more tax cuts for the middle class.\u00a0 They also wanted more stimulus.\u00a0 They got all that, at a huge cost to the Federal treasury.<\/p>\n Republicans wanted an extension of tax cuts to the middle class and the very wealthy, which they insisted would also provide a major stimulus.\u00a0 They got all taht, at a similarly huge cost to the Federal treasury.<\/p>\n Everybody wins, right?<\/p>\n Except that at the end of the day there is absolutely no sign that either party is serious about tackling long-term systemic deficits.<\/p>\n It’s hard to see a future where these kind of deals won’t keep getting made.\u00a0 Republicans will have their special projects, or their constituencies who need big piles of Federal cash.<\/p>\n Democrats will have their sacred cows, their pet projects, their base that needs help.\u00a0 The impulse to keep spending is incredibly powerful.<\/p>\n As we’ve seen here in New York, that kind of dynamic leads to a very bleak place indeed, where our choices become more and more limited by the burden of debt and other financial obligations that we carry on our backs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Barack Obama appears to have struck a deal with Democratic and Republican leaders that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3354,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353\/revisions\/3354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}