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"I just wanted to thank so many on the other side after all these years, for finally acknowledging publicly that ninety-eight percent of the Bush tax cuts helped the middle class.”
~Representative Louis Gohmert (R-Texas)

Even in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election, events vindicate the man whom he distastefully scapegoats:  George W. Bush.

Consider first this week’s “fiscal cliff” stalemate.

Since November, liberals have claimed a sweeping ideological mandate, a validation of their political agenda, at least insofar as higher taxes were concerned.  Obama himself wasted no opportunity to assert that voters were offered a choice of higher or lower taxes, and they opted for the former.  A watershed shift, they seemed to think.

Viewed from a broader perspective, however, reality is very different.

Obama and his party just did something that Republicans couldn’t do even when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.  Namely, make the Bush tax cuts permanent for approximately 99% of Americans.

To reinforce the point, note that higher tax rates were set to automatically take effect on January 1.  Accordingly, if Obama and fellow Democrats had done nothing, the Bush tax cuts that they’ve spent the past decade demonizing would vanish at the stroke of midnight.

By way of contrast, back in May 2003 Congress enacted the cuts by the slimmest of margins, 50 to 50 in the Senate (with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the tiebreaking vote) and 231 to 200 in the House.  Among Democrats, the Senate ratio was 46 to 2 against, while the House ratio was 198 to 7 against.  Ten years later, despite an election that improved their party balance in both the Senate and House, as well as a re-elected President and a Republican party in disarray, Democrats sought only a tax hike on a tiny portion of Americans.

Thus, ten years of supposed liberal ascendancy has come to mean almost complete permanence of Bush tax cuts that originally faced nearly unanimous Democratic opposition.


http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/43-taxes-and-economy/1701-the-vindication-of-george-w-bush

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