...and Speaker Boehner is willing to meet him half-way.
By "All In", I mean that the income re-distribution will reach well down into the middle class, and NOT be restricted to just millionaires, as most of the yippy-skippy GOP seems to believe.
Evidence: Senator Kent Conrad, (D), North Dakota, put the Mortgage Interest tax deduction at the top of his list of "revenue" things to look at, in an interview on CNBC this ayem just before 1200 EST. You will have to excuse Sen. Conrad. He comes from the only state in the Union with an unemployment rate lower than 4%. He seems to think that everyone has money flowing from out of the ground like they do in ND.
This run on the personal wealth of everone above the official poverty level has to stop, and stop now. Yes, it will hurt when we go over the "fiscal cliff", but at this point, if that is the only way to stop Obama and his runaway spending and ballooning of the deficit, we'll just have to take that ride.
This blog hasn't posted any "enemies lists" before, in it's almost-nine-year-history. That was a peacetime rule, and we're at war now, a war to save ourselves, so now we start up an Internal Enemies list.
The first name on that list is Kent Conrad, but he won't be there by himself for long.
Actualy, Sen. Conrad's idea might not be all that bad - IF, AND ONLY "IF", we threw out all tax laws and designed a new system. But as a patch upon a patch upon a bandaid on a multi-patched tax system or inner tube - it is truly bogus.
It's all politics. Conrad didn't run again, is a lame duck. He is safely repaying the Dem party for its past support that has earned him a gold-plated (cancel that and make it "solid gold") retirement and benefit system.
The Reps don't want to let Bush's temporary tax cuts for the rich to expire. The ONLY way they would accept that would be if the middle class's tax cuts also expired, and some "entitlments" were cut. Now the Dems can't accept that, it screws over their middle class members, as well as everyone on welfare that hopes they will be "given" a house, since home ownership is one of the basic American dreams and "should" be available to all.
Enter lame-duck Sen. Conrad. He makes this outrageous proposal. See, Dems are willing to screw everyone, not just the rich. Now the rich hate this idea, since they get more benefits from the deduction than the poor - but they can't argue that; it's really best for them both to keep the provision and pretend it helps the middle class more than them.
And the Dems are going to tolerate this unspoken truth to remain unspoken, because they now have the high moral ground "we offered to share the pain and you rejected it".
It's all stinking BS politics. I'm not saying the idea won't fly (it should be DOA), but it is political brinkmanship of an all too common type.
Posted by: Richard Bergerson | November 29, 2012 at 08:07