Wonkbook: The debt-ceiling deal so far - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post
A bit more information has trickled out over the last few days detailing the exact state of the budget negotiations when they collapsed. Both sides, as they often said, were shooting for about $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. They'd already agreed on around $1 trillion in spending cuts and were making good progress on the rest of it. But Democrats insisted that $400 billion -- so, 17 percent -- of the package be tax increases. And that's when Republicans walked.
Specifically, the Obama administration was looking at a rule that lets businesses value their inventory at less than they bought it for in order to lower their tax burden, a loophole that lets hedge-fund managers count their income as capital gains and pay a 15 percent marginal tax rate, the tax treatment of private jets, oil and gas subsidies, and a limit on itemized deductions for the wealthy.
It's almost not worth going into the details on those particular tax changes because the Republican position has held that the details don't matter: well-designed tax increases won't be looked at any more favorably than poorly designed tax increases. The point, Republicans say, is that there can't be any tax increases, full stop.
Is there any doubt now where the loyalties of the GOP lie?
This reminds me of a true story I was told several years ago when I attended a corporate workshop/teambuilding event.
A woman told me about how excited she had been to transfer to a particular high profile dept where the management employees engaged in making deals all around the world for our telecommunications company.
She was excited because these people were supposed to be the best and the brightest the company had. They were people with advanced degrees who also spoke multiple languages. She said that she was SO looking forward to all the things she would learn from people whose abilities she was sure were head and shoulders above other depts.
She ended up being VERY disappointed.
It seems that these people were vain, and petty, and were only interested in making and closing deals, regardless of how good or bad those deals were for the company. In fact, many of the deals weren't good deals at all.
I could probably go into more detail, but it's not really that important to the story.
Most people would like to believe that our representatives in DC would put the collective interests of the American people first and foremost -- especially in tough times. Guess again. Many of these representatives are vain and petty just like the management reps of that fortune 500 company. Good versus bad and right versus wrong don't matter as much to many of our representatives as we would like to believe. To them, it's about winning versus losing, regardless of whether what you end up winning is anything other than denying the opposition any kind of victory. Then, of course, many of these representatives aren't working for the betterment of America, or Americans in general. They're trying to please a very small segment of their campaign donors or their perceived political base of followers who scream at even the hint of compromise.
God help America! I say that because I just have no faith that our elected representatives are collectively prepared and/or willing and able to place the interests of average Americans above their desire to satisfy their own egos through petty partisan bickering. If these representatives were fire fighters, they would never make it to your home in time to put out a fire because they would be arguing about what was they best route to get there.
They're pathetic.