On January 2, 2013, Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Whatever the ultimate shape of the “fiscal cliff” solution that has preoccupied all Washington, and a fair swath of the rest of country, in the final days of 2012 and into the new year, Americans of all walks of life should be asking themselves this question: How do we like being conned?
Its essential elements include expiration of the President George W. Bush-era income and capital gains tax cuts on couples’ incomes over $450,000, and a modest increase in the estate tax.
Unemployment benefits and tax credits for lower-income families will be extended. The payroll tax holiday that replaced a low- and middle-income tax credit in 2009 will end, but the tax credit won’t return. Many other items, including the fate of automatic spending cuts mandated by the 2011 debt-ceiling deal, are being put off for weeks or months. Another debt-ceiling fight looms on the near horizon.
Almost everything mentioned above involves a con game of one sort or another, because almost none of it is what it seems on the surface. Since such fakery is certain to continue well into the new year, here’s a quick guide to its basic features.
At this stage of our anemic economic growth (2.5 percent) and the exponential march of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that continue to destroy and devalue jobs, we need massive government investment via loan guarantees to stimulate economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership in FUTURE income-producing assets with the result of creating “customers with money” and far less dependence on taxpayer-supported government welfare, open and concealed.
Until President Obama addresses the central issue of CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP this exercise will continue with the result being no real ECONOMIC GROWTH in which EVERY American benefits as a FUTURE owner of the income-producing productive capital assets made possible by furthering technological innovation and invention, thus empowering them as “customers with money” who can then support the purchase of the products and services that the economy is capable of delivering. The issue comes down to Own or Be Owned!––whether the United States will become a country where EVERY American benefits as owners in its productive capacity or a minority of the wealthiest Americans dominate an otherwise slaved people––employed at low wages or on welfare and dependent on taxpayer-supported charity.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20130102,0,573514.column
So the author cites that the debt ceiling has been raised numerous times in the past without it becoming such a politicized issue by the republicans. Yet he makes no mention that president Obama did the EXACT SAME THING during the “fiscal cliff” idiocy, when he refused to extend the bush tax cuts, something he has done numerous times since taking office. And raising taxes on anyone, even the reviled and pure evil 1%, was something president Obama promised not to do only 3 years ago.
I also think its pretty comical that there were zero spending cuts in the latest deal, and tax raises on everyone, yet our learned betters in the media continue to paint the situation as the republicans ‘holding the country hostage to get their way.’