How Idiotic

With the tax bill passing the House, here is the take of bloomberg News, supposedly a business oriented news service: "The bill marked the second time in nearly two years that Congress rammed through a massive economic stimulus. The first one, Obama's $814 billion spending bill, was opposed by Republicans who complained about its impact on annual deficits, now hovering at about $1.3 trillion annually." You have to wonder what planet the reporter comes from. The bulk of the so-called stimulus comes from keeping middle class tax rates unchanged, something that everyone has agreed should happen since the 2008 presidential campaign. Then there is the so-called stimulus of not raising taxes on the wealthy, a much smaller amount. Again, keeping taxes the same as this year is hardly a stimulus. Oh, then we have setting the estate tax at 35%; this is up from 0% during 2010. Here raising taxes is called a stimulus; even for Bloomberg this is idiotic. Then there is the extension of unemployment benefits. While this is stimulative it was hardly passed for that reason. that would be like calling a cost of living increase in Social Security a stimulus package. Next we have the continuation of a few of the current tax breaks that were set to expire. More of keeping taxes where they are as stimulus. Finally, we have the temporary payroll tax reduction. This will cost about 100 billion dollars and will indeed be a stimulus. In other words, only about 15% of the total bill is properly called a stimulus. Everything else is either keeping taxes as they are now or raising them by less than was expected.

I have to assume that the reporter and the editor of this piece are either to uneducated to understand that the talking point of the Democrats who want to tar the GOP as having promoted a "stimulus" like they did are false, or they are part of the group that is pushing those phony talking points.

The nice thing is that the bill has now passed. This is not going to make the economy much better; it will, however, prevent the policy pushed by the Democrats which would have made the economy much worse. it is sort of like the Hippocratic Oath for politicians -- First, do no harm!