Congress' heinous behavior creates nothing but suffering for U.S. citizens

(PNI) I think this is pretty accurate:

Congress creates a fiscal crisis with a known default date, and then takes the summer off. Congress passes a law that doesn't apply equally to all citizens, and then can't make it work.

The president and the Senate refuse to negotiate on anything, and the House Republicans get the blame.

Premeditated targeting of selected groups during the shutdown inflicts intentional suffering on citizens. The intentional, heinous actions of not caring for our fallen soldiers and their families is despicable.

We get to watch it happen all over again in 10 or 12 weeks -- after they take the Christmas holidays off. Brilliant!

What did I miss?

--Mike Sromek, Glendale

Responsibilities for lawmakers

An agreement on the partial government shutdown and the debt ceiling has been reached. Most Republicans again cave. Therefore, President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and moderate Republicans are now responsible for:

1. Continued high unemployment.

2. Enormous public debt and its burden on our children and grandchildren.

3. "Obamacare" dysfunction.

4. Growing taxation.

5. The continuing loss of personal freedom.

--Lowell Ziemann, Happy Jack

Good riddance to the 'tea party'

In 2010, after the "tea party" rose to a minority voice in Congress, a member of President Barack Obama's staff said the tea party would be merely a footnote in history in two years.

Well, he was wrong; it took three years. Either way, good riddance.

Now maybe the Congress can get back to solving the nation's problems instead of creating them.

--Joe SecolaScottsdale

Get rid of the 'lords' in Congress

I have had it. Our federal lawmakers (House and Senate, Democrat and Republican) seem to forget that they are, or should be, subject to the laws they create.

Many have been in office much too long. As a result, they think they are lords and we are the serfs in their fiefdoms.

Those who have been there more than 12 years are the problem. They must remember that they set the spending levels, create laws for all of us, oversee bureaus and agencies. They have created this mess and refuse to fix it.

It's time to get rid of all of them and start over. We need people in office who are servants of this country and will work for the betterment of the country.

--Alice Wilson, Sun City

Congress, cut your own salaries

Hey, Congress! Why not pass a 10 to 20 percent cut in your salary to go along with your apology to America? Americans are understanding and just might re-elect you.

--Ed Laird, New River

Hatred is just bad propaganda

Because Rep. Brenda Barton, R-Payson, wants to make analogies related to the politics of the 1930s, I have one also: Joseph Goebbels (minister of propaganda for the most hated regime in history). He would have been proud of the success of the anti-Obama propaganda seen on the Internet, TV and print media.

Prejudice and hatred are the tools of a minority just as they were in Munich in the 1920s.

Give us back our democratic process.

--George Egly, Sun City

Copyright 2013 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

The Tax Deal That Simplified Nothing

For more than a decade, lawmakers in both parties have lamented the complexity of the federal tax code, even as they layered on new deductions, credits and variable tax rates intended to reward some activities and punish others.

The deal struck by the White House and Senate on New Year’s Day to head off the huge tax increases of the so-called fiscal cliff actually made matters worse on the complexity front. The highest marginal tax rate was increased to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for couples earning over $450,000 ($400,000 for individuals). In doing so, however, negotiators increased the total number of tax brackets to seven from six.

Tax rates on capital gains and dividends for families earning less than that $450,000 threshold remain at 15 percent, but those who earn more will have some of their investments taxed at 20 percent. And personal exemption and tax deduction phase-outs, known as PEP and Pease, are coming back starting at incomes as low as $250,000. President George W. Bush banished those in 2001. (PEP stands for personal exemption phaseout, and Pease for former Representative Donald J. Pease, the Ohio Democrat who created the deduction cap.)

The changes may sound like enough to make you ditch your tax-preparation software and run screaming as fast as you can to a professional accountant.

But by the end of the year, efforts in both the House and Senate to overhaul the tax code, simplify it and strip out many bewildering and contradictory tax breaks might bear fruit. That’s because both political parties have an incentive, although not the same incentive, to move forward.

“Tax reform is alive and well,” said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “There’s such a need to simplify the code, to help the code be more competitive, to address a lot of inequities,” he said, adding that because the New Year’s tax deal did practically nothing to close loopholes and unclutter the tax code, “the road is clear.”

Republicans are being driven by a long-held desire for simplification, pressed hard by the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan. Conservatives in the House have been clamoring to take on tax reform since they swept to power in 2010. And after a year of listening sessions, tutorials and hearings, Mr. Camp and the rest of the House Republican leadership want to move forward.

For Democrats, it’s mainly about the money. The deal to avert the fiscal cliff contained tax rate increases, which President Obama has been demanding since his 2008 run for the White House. But the rate increases were not as inclusive as those he had campaigned for — he wanted tax rates to rise on incomes above $250,000, dividends to be taxed as ordinary income and inherited estates to face considerably higher rates and lower exemptions from taxation than the final deal demanded.

On the estate tax, Mr. Obama wanted to subject the value of estates over $3.5 million to a 45 percent tax, higher than the 2012 level of 35 percent on estates over $5 million. The final deal did get a higher rate — 40 percent — but kept the exemption at $5 million, or $10 million for married couples, indexed for inflation. With that indexing, the exemption comes in at about $5.1 million for 2012 — double for a couple — a level that exempts all but a tiny number of inheritances.

 By raising taxes on incomes over $400,000, Congress also effectively raised only the top marginal income tax rate, not the top two, as the president and most Democrats had wanted. (It is the “marginal” rate because it applies only to income above a certain threshold.)

Raising tax rates further won’t be simple, said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who as a leader of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has spent more than a decade examining tax shelters and dodges. The only way to raise more revenue for deficit reduction at this point, he said, lies with a tax code overhaul that curtails or eliminates breaks that favor the affluent and hits corporations that use offshore tax structures to shelter profits.

View the original article here

Ye Olde Partisanship Is Nothing New

WASHINGTON — An American political system marked by partisanship and polarization engenders despair from both Republicans and Democrats.

Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the few congressional Republicans who comfortably works with members of the other party, decided to retire last year lamenting “the sensible center has disappeared from American politics.”

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who heads the Senate Budget Committee, said he realized it was “time for me to leave” when a senior colleague told him, “Your problem, Conrad, is you’re too solutions-oriented. You’ve never understood this is political theater.’”

This is a periodic refrain. A generation ago it was even more pronounced and pessimistic, as I describe in my latest column.

Jimmy Carter was president. With his legislative agenda stalled, he faced a
challenge within his own party, a relentlessly hostile opposition Republican Party, a sluggish economy and runaway inflation. In the summer of 1979 the president gave a speech on America’s “crisis of confidence.” It often is labeled the “malaise” speech, though Carter never used that word.

Four months later, Iranian radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year.

This exacerbated the despair, coming as it did on the heels of the American defeat in Vietnam.

“The last time we got involved with a two-bit country we lost 50,000 men,” lamented one of Washington’s wise men, the late Harry McPherson, who had been counsel to President Lyndon Johnson. “Now we were involved with another one, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

Another of the presidential wise men, Lloyd Cutler, then counsel to
Mr. Carter, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs suggesting that our
political system was broken and America should consider changing to a
parliamentary system.

Ronald Reagan was elected, he proved to be a forceful president, and talk about altering the system diminished.

View the original article here