UPDATE: Bush Tax Cuts

The long and short? They are sticking around. President Obama reached a deal with the Grand Old Party, extending the tax cuts from the Bush Era another two years. He also decided to lower estate taxes. Before everyone gets all excited you should know this is only going to affect those in the $250k a year bracket; all 2% of you.

The president was kind of between a rock and a hard place. His option was to refuse to give the GOP a tax cut for the millionaires and in turn watch them refuse to do anything about helping the unemployed or give the extension and receive extended unemployment benefits for thirteen more months, a cut in payroll taxes and expansion of the earned income tax credit. If they had been allowed to expire, the middle class would be paying 2-5% more (avg. of $900 annually).

Let’s venture to the economic side of the tax issue here for a second and then address the frame work. Are these cuts really going to be the economy’s saving grace? Their effect will be insignificant at best. The beloved tax policy of Reagan/Bush has taken the economy from bad to worse. Nothing the guys on the hill have done will be stopping this from continue to do so. Through all this unrest the only thing that has happened is the exact thing that caused other economic issues in our history. People are scared and the rich are enabled to hoard more and more. Then the government wants to come along and take more money out of the system. Alas the proud economic base and interlaced monetary beams of a world power is eroded.

A press release from the White House sites a memo from Morgan Stanley as a reason for our Congress to pass the tax break on the wealthy. Aside from the fact that Mongan Stanley helped run our economy into the ground, they were also one of the top corp. campaign contributors to Pres. Obama. The company was also given a 2 trillion Bailout by Obama’s Fed.

What does this say? The White House, the voice of the president cites a bank that we had to bail out as a objective source on the economy? And they are doing so to feed us a tax plan that gets the company’s execs new tax cuts. They are either being very bold or think the we are all seriously ignorant of our countries dealings. You pick.