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This is the headline we should really be seeing after last night's fiscal cliff deal.
As a result of the deal, the bulk of the Bush tax cuts will remain permanently in place, the AMT will be eliminated, and Obama's stimulus tax cuts, mainly aimed at the working poor, will live on for another five years (as well as stimulus tax cuts for business.)
Now that the future revenue path is pretty clear for the next decade, I took another look at President Obama's 2013 budget, which projects spending and revenue through 2022 on the assumption -- a correct one, it turns out -- that taxes will only rise on the affluent.
New York -- In response to the late night passage of a tax deal by the US House of Representatives, Miles Rapoport, president of the national nonpartisan public policy organization Demos released the following statement:
"It is in the nature of a complicated bipartisan agreement that it looks very different depending on what prism you look at it through. Two elements are critically important: what is actually in the bill that passed and the President will sign, and how its passage ‘sets up’ the future fiscal debates.
While tax hikes on the affluent have gotten most of the attention in the fiscal cliff deal, an equally important story is how proposals for further stimulus spending died a quiet death in Washington over recent weeks.
Though technology and innovation have squeezed trading costs, the industry's profits are accounting for a bigger share of U.S. GDP, a former Goldman banker says, needlessly diverting some $635 bln from the broader economy. It lends credence to ideas like a transaction tax.
Political scientists who study Congress, like the scholar Douglas Arnold, have long argued that while money matters in politics, legislators ultimately tend to be responsive to their constituents.
All of Washington seems to agree that tax loopholes should be closed. Yet, as a practical matter, closing some of the biggest loopholes is no easy thing because of their importance to individuals and the economy as a whole. Take a meat cleaver to the home mortgage interest deduction and you hurt a fragile housing sector. Whack the exclusion of employer health insurance and you upend our system of work-based coverage.
Once upon a time, a few decades ago, members of the U.S. Senate spent a fair amount of time together and got to know each other personally. They were more likely to stick around Washington on the weekends, and during breaks, and socialized together more often with their families.
Once upon a time, too, the party lines in the Senate were pretty fuzzy. Republican Senators from the north were often more liberal than Democratic Senators from the south. Alliances and friendship across party lines were common.