Grover Norquist: letting tax cuts expire not an increase

If something is twelve and it becomes thirteen, that is an increase. Even if it used to be thirteen and it was reduced to twelve and the reduction was scheduled to be temporary. That just makes it a scheduled increase. Norquist is just playing word games to try to allow people to wiggle out of the pledge.

It's funny though, because the Dem's (both in office and on this board) try to argue the same thing all the time (that it is not a tax increase). Maybe the one time that Norquist is in agreement with them, he gets a thread mocking him.

 

i don't think he's mocking norquist.

and if the republicans didn't want this "increase", maybe they shouldn't have voted for it when it was originally passed.

 

The whole pledge is a word game designed to destroy the nation.

 

So, since Bush was the architect of these tax cuts, which were specifically limited in duration, - it would be accurate for me to say that he increased taxes, since he signed into law provisions that they would expire in 2011?

 

So we should all get every tax rebate ever handed out since we had them at one time? Temporary mans temporary, with a time limit on it.

 

yeah, was that a freudian slip? :grin:

 

1993:

TIM RUSSERT: Is the energy tax a fight until death, or are you willing to compromise a little bit with Senator Boren, modify if a bit--

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Fight until death over taxes? Oh no. Women, country, God, things like that. Taxes? No.

 

I would say he designed them to be increased, in the hope that a future Congress would later block the increase, but yes that would be more accurate than saying there is no tax increase when the rate is higher one day than it was the day before.

Every time there is a tax rebate and you don't get the same rebate the next year, all other things being equal, your taxes have been increased. Whether you should always get the same rebate is a matter of policy, but it doesn't change the definition of the word increase. The overnight drop in temperature is temporary. It warms up again when the sun in shining. The fact that it is temporary does not mean that the temperature today has not increased from last night.

 

mmhmm...well, that's a refreshingly forward-minded way to look at the world.

It's more accurate to describe things that exist by describing what they don't do and how they don't exist. The U.S. Capitol building, instead of being descirbed as a big ol' building in Washington DC, is more accurately described as the absence of a building in New York or Boston or Philadelphia. Very metaphysical.