Talking Points: Refute the Tax-Scamming GOPers and the Bush 2010 Tax Increase

Talking Point 1: It’s a Bush Tax Increase.

We here at BV all know that George W. Bush booby-trapped the Bush Tax cuts, which were set to expire on Dec 31, 2010.  Our task is to reduce the revisionism of the radical wrong-wing.  Bush’s sordid economic legacy, including a false belief in excessive tax-cutting and lax economic oversight, resulted in the second worst financial collapse in US history. He turned the Clinton surplus into a looming budge deficit. He  handed Obama a nightmare economyto sort out. The GOP is hoping enough Americans forget the facts that they can get away with scamming the middle class again.

GOPhers, along with some Conservadems, helped Bush bestow huge tax cuts to the wealthy.  Then they helped Bush set an expiration date, in part, because tax cuts set in a reconciliation bill cannot be in effect more than 10 years. But there’s another reason, which is down-right Rovian. BTW, remember that every time the GOPhers weep about Dems using reconciliation, or Dems refuse to use it.  

By design, the expiration would reach well into what was predicted to be a Democratic resurgence, which tax-cut extremists could sabotage. The GOP talking points nearly wrote themselves.  

When the tax cuts were about to expire, they envisioned using the same old anti-logic: If the tax cuts expire, they become a “tax increase!” But they are, as Lawrence O’Donnell correctly notes, actually a Bush tax increase.  

Talking Point 2: The Tax-Cutting Extremists Want to Give away the Store to the Rich, Then Try to Eliminate or Privatize Middle Class Lifelines

The gift to the wealthy amounted to a stage-setting for Act 2, the attempted robbery of Social Security, Medicare, and other entire programs that people want.  The deficit resulting from the purposeful tax cuts were designed to excuse them when they try to bring the Middle Class to its collective knees and surrender their life-line programs.

Talking Point No. 3: The GOP Plans the Great 2010 Robbery of the Middle Class

And So, The GOPhers Want to Stage the Great Robbery of of the Middle Class, 2010. They call any call for tax fairness “class warfare,” while orchestrating class warfare.  They attack the unemployed as “lazy” or just “sitting there.”  GOPhers do nothing, or recommend nothing, to help those suffering under the lingering Bush economic collapse.  Recently, there even has been heightened derision by GOP talking heads of the important American Value, of social justice.

Talking Point No. 4: The Tax-Cuts in Question Affect the Top 1-2% of Americans

Now GOPhers and Conservadems (Kent Conrad, I’m talking to you) have mounted a rabid, deceptive opposition to the expiration of the great Bush Robbery of the Middle Class.  Presidential wannabe and acting underachiever (does anyone think the man can act?) Fred Thompson has cut a new ad which actually outdoes Peter Peterson in Machiavellianism. Thompson fronts for the “astroturf” League of American Voters, cleverly named to confuse the viewer into thinking it’s the venerable League of Women Voters.  It’s Exhibit B (Exhibit A being Peter Peterson’s film and advertising charade) in the marketing of a tax scam.  You can watch it here. Thompson lies to middle class Americans in hopes they’ll believe that the percentage of tax increases he mentions applies to them.  It doesn’t..

Talking Point No. 5: Tax Cuts for the Rich Increase Deficits

The Bush Middle Class Robbery is bad enough.  But there is also the untidy fact that tax cuts for the rich do not reduce deficits. Finally, a GOPher blurted out that tax cuts really do increase the deficit.  

SCULLY: Tax cuts, do they increase the debt or do they spur economic growth?

NUNES: Well, I think that they increase the debt. If you let them expire at the end of the year we’re going to have a huge, the largest tax increase in American history.

You either cut off a legitimate and fair revenue stream, or you don’t. And if you do, then don’t wah! wah! to the rest of us about “sacrifice.”  Indeed, what would really happen the day the Bush tax cuts expire, is that we’d have the first installment on both tax justice and deficit reduction. It’s time to pay the piper.  A tax cut which never should have happened, should be allowed to expire. Meanwhile, GOPhers, Kent Conrad and others want us to pity the poor, poor wealthy 1-2%. They are just struggling so much that they need a hand up.  It’s just so sad.