It gets to a point, in this crazy world--the world in which our bridges are falling down, roads are crumbling, hospitals are closing down, schools don't have enough supplies for kids--when flushing $42 billion down the drain just seems like no big fucking deal. In the pathetic bi-partisan world of budget nonsense and more give-aways for corporations and the elite, $42 billion is seen as a "compromise."
Ah, yes, tax extenders. Bully to the president for threatening to veto the first deal Harry Reid was willing to let pass the Senate. But, even in its slimmed down version, the one the Senate will take up, $42 billion just gets pissed away.
The climate-change deniers in the House have already passed the "compromise". Per Citizens for Tax Justice:
Here are just a few of the problems with H.R. 5771:
■ Most of the tax breaks fail to achieve any desirable policy goals. For example, they include bonus depreciation breaks for investments in equipment that the Congressional Research Service have found to be a “relatively ineffective tool for stimulating the economy, a tax credit for research defined so loosely that it includes the work soft drink companies put into developing new flavors,and a tax break that allows General Electric to do financial business offshore without paying U.S. taxes on the profits.
■ The tax breaks cannot possibly be effective in encouraging businesses to do anything because they are almost entirely retroactive. The tax breaks actually expired at the end of 2013 and this bill will extend them (almost entirely retroactively) through 2014. These tax provisions are supposedly justified as incentives for companies to do things Congress thinks are desirable, like investing in equipment or research, but that justification makes no sense when tax breaks are provided to businesses for things they have done in the past.
■ The bill increases the deficit by $42 billion to provide tax breaks that mostly benefit businesses, even after members of Congress have refused to enact any measure that helps working people unless the costs are offset. The measures that Congress refused to enact without offsets include everything from creating jobs by funding highway projects to extending emergency unemployment benefits.[emphasis added]
And:
If approved by the Senate and signed by the President, the bill will cap a long debate over the fate of the tax extenders, the provisions that Congress has often enacted every couple of years to extend a long list of temporary tax breaks that mostly benefit businesses. While the Senate seemed ready this year to enact an $85 billion bill to extend these breaks for two years, the House of Representatives took a different approach and approved several bills that would make some of these tax breaks permanent, increasing the budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.
An attempt by lawmakers from both parties to combine these approaches — making some breaks permanent while extending the rest for two years at a total cost of $450 billion — was torpedoed by the President’s veto threat last week. In response, the House Republican leadership brought to the floor the new bill to extend most of the breaks for just one year, at a cost of $42 billion.
The cost of the tax extenders will be far greater if Congress does not break its habit of extending these provisions over and over. In that scenario, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that these tax breaks will cost about $700 billion over the coming decade.[emphasis added]
CTJ has a detailed breakdown and discussion of the tax extenders.
IDIOTIC waste of money.
Given that this is just a huge waste of money, why not just pile up in the public squares of Americas, distribute the cash say roughly a billion dollars per state, and just torch it. Make a big bonfire--at least some people without homes can get a temporary moment of warmth because, probably the most useful thing you can do with this pile.