Crossposted from Hillbilly Report.
Another day another Mitch McConnell hypocrisy or flat-out lie whichever you choose to call it. His obsession to in this case not balance the budget on the backs of working Americans while redistributing our nation's wealth from those who work for it to himself and his ilk knows no limits. Today, he and Charles Grassley offered an amendment to stop the "largest tax increase in American history" but actually it hypocritically promises two things. Not only slashing programs working Americans depend on, but an even larger tax increase because of a huge funding gap. Of course in the world of Mitch McConnell tax increases do not count if you increase them on working Americans. They only count if you increase them on rich Americans like himself.
Indeed, the hypocrisy just continues to spew like poison from the mouth of the favorite "son-in-law" of Communist China:
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell with Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and others introduced an amendment today to prevent the Senate Democrats’ trillion-dollar tax increase – the largest tax increase in American history. The amendment, offered as part of the FY 2014 Budget Resolution, also calls for comprehensive tax reform to boost the economy, create jobs and ensure Americans can keep more of their hard-earned money.
“The Senate Democrat budget is nothing more than a rehash of the same tired policies that continue to pummel the middle class,” Senator McConnell said. “While the Democrats prefer to increase spending and taxes rather than balance the budget, middle-class families want Congress to focus on growing the economy, not the government. We need to control spending and balance the budget in order to kick-start economic growth and create American jobs.”
http://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/...
But McConnell fails to mention a few things. First, that the "spending on government" he is whining about is actually an investment in America for something that is desperately needed. JOBS. Something he blocked in a shameless attempt to deny President Obama a second term. How did that work out Mitchy-boy?
Indeed, McConnell and the Republicans are the ones who seek to "rehash the same old tired policies that pummel the middle-class". Or at least ship their jobs overseas and redistribute their wealth to the very top. The Paul Ryan budget that Republicans take as gospel does just that. It continues the policies of trickle-down that have been tried over and over again.
However, these policies cannot be called "failures". The truth is these policies have succeeded in doing just what they were meant to do. They redistributed wealth from bottom to top on a huge scale and ran our national debt through the roof giving folks like Ryan and McConnell just what they wanted. A chance to tell the most vulnerable Americans among us that they are the problem and anything that helps them must be gutted.
But before Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan or any of the other greedy, lying reverse Robin Hoods in the Republican Party try to tell you they are cutting taxes and balancing the budget you should consider this. Like everything else that comes out of their poisonous mouths this is a lie. The Republican/Ryan budget does anything but cut taxes and it certainly does not balance the budget.
You see as always there is a problem with "Republican math". That problem? A huge funding gap even with the draconian slashing of social programs. Why? Because as always with Republicans this budget slashes taxes on corporations and the greediest and least patriotic among us. This chart shows the huge funding gap this will create:
In other words even after they gut social programs Americans have earned and depend on they are still looking at a huge shortfall. That is because they greedily insist on giving themselves even more tax cuts. Even more than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on and lost. Do you want to know the dirty little secret? Just like Mitt Romney Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have only one choice to balance the budget. They will have to RAISE YOUR TAXES to SLASH THEIRS:
If, on the other hand, policymakers truly sought to offset the full $6 trillion in costs by scaling back tax expenditures, they could only do so by increasing taxes on households with incomes below $200,000. When the TPC analyzed a similar plan from Governor Romney — which would have cut the top income-tax rate from 35 to 28 percent — it found that even after dramatically scaling back tax expenditures for filers with incomes above $200,000, Romney’s plan would still have provided large net tax cuts to those households. To pay for these tax cuts without adding to the deficit, TPC estimated that families with children and with incomes below $200,000 would have faced tax increases of about $2,000 per family, on average.
The tax cuts that Chairman Ryan seeks are substantially larger than Governor Romney’s, with a goal of cutting the top rate from 39.6 to 25 percent. Without any cuts to tax expenditures, reaching the Ryan budget’s goal of a 25 percent top rate while abolishing the AMT and repealing the Affordable Care Act’s revenue-raising measures would result in tax cuts worth an average of about $330,000 a year to households with incomes of more than $1 million a year; the tax cuts for high-income filers would necessarily be larger under Ryan’s plan than under Romney’s.[3] As explained below, even with the same dramatic scaling back of tax expenditures for filers with incomes above $200,000 that TPC examined in its Romney analysis — including entirely wiping out their deductions for mortgage interest and charitable giving — families with children that have incomes below $200,000 would have to face tax increases averaging more than $3,000 a year, if policymakers were to avoid increasing the deficit while reaching Chairman Ryan’s 25-percent top-tax-rate goal.
http://www.cbpp.org/...
Get that? Far from being satisfied with the wealth they have already redistributed from you to them Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and the Republicans expect you to make yet another $3,000 donation to their greed. After three decades of trickle-down economics decimating the middle-class and our economy all they are worried about is how to steal more of your money from you.
Someone needs to ask Mitch McConnell and the Republicans this. Which is it? Does this budget cut taxes or balance the budget? The sad truth is it does neither. It raises taxes on a huge majority of Americans but even still will never come up with enough to fill the huge funding gap.
In fact, the only promises kept in the Republican budget is simple. It slashes taxes for a very few people all while gutting funding for anything that helps anyone left behind by thirty years of Conservative greed and idiocy. In that manner, it is a promise kept by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans.