It seems they could get away with an “of course we’ll extend them” response and be done with it. It’ll be something that the Republican and Democrat candidate both “agree” on, so it’s won’t be interesting to cover it. Of course, fair to disagree and it wouldn’t be shocking for it to be part of the debate.
My view is that very few people in Congress really care about this ephemeral idea of national debt. They made them temporary because of the Byrd rule; not because they care about the debt. But, I guess we have to wait and see.
If they were following the Byrd Rule, the legislation would have had to REDUCE the deficit, yet the GOP admits to it increasing the debt by $1.5 trillion, even though it will actually add trillions.
Any bill being passed under reconciliation has to comply with every section of the six-part Byrd Rule. If it fails any one of these tests, it must be stripped out:
The provision must change federal spending or revenue.
If the bill does not meet the budget resolution’s instructions to reduce the federal deficit, any provision that results in either increased spending or decreased revenue is removed until it does meet those targets.
The provision must only affect policies that fall under the jurisdiction of the specific committees that were instructed in the budget resolution.
The provision’s effect on spending or revenues must be more than incidental to its policy impact.
The provision cannot increase the federal deficit at some point in the future, beyond the typical 10-year ‘budget window’ that is used to evaluate legislation.
Ok, the reconciliation rules. Either way, you choosing to debate irrelevant points doesn’t help prove your point that they made it temporary because of the deficit and debt generally. They wanted to increase the debt even more and they were forced to cut back because of the reconciliation rules.
I don’t know why I’m bothering, because it’s still not relevant to the point you’re trying to make. But the ability to propose reconciliation is derived from the budget bills (originally derived from the Budget Act). Those bills provide rules on what is allowed in reconciliation. The FY18 budget imposed a rule that reconciliation cannot increase the deficit by more than $1.5T. From the FY18 budget:
Unfortunately joe Friday followed us here too. He’s a known democrat party trumpeter. Who pulls quotes from others on the net n passes them off on his own. No amount of common sense nor proving him wrong will ever allow you to hear him say you are right and I am wrong.
He doesn’t work like that.
In case you needed a reminder on how progressive the tax code was already and how it got moreso under the new tax rules. By quinitiles of taxable income, here is the % of income taxes paid:
For 2018, households in the top 20% will have income of about $150,000… will pay about 87% of income taxes
By contrast, the lower 60% of households, who have income up to about $86,000, receive about 27% of income. As a group, this tier will pay no net federal income tax in 2018
Sounds like the bottom 60% of households by income have enough votes for even higher taxes on Someone Else.
Those in all tiers (except unemployed) pay payroll taxes, and we’ve decided that they shouldn’t be subject to additional taxes. For those in tiers 1 and 2, we’ve decided we should tax them more to have a progressive system. This is where the income tax comes in - it supplements the payroll tax. Especially because those in tier 1 don’t pay the social security portion on excess over whatever the limit is (but it’s less than 150k).
ETA: Definitely agree that we have a very progressive system, no argument there.
