Back-door thievery

[SuperScout]

Pelosi Congress Sending You a $2,641 Bill

The average American family will have to pay an extra $2,641 a year if President Bush's 2003 tax cuts are allowed to expire -- but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats have given no indication they plan to extend the cuts.

"The mugging will lift $3.3 trillion from purses and wallets because the 2003 cuts will begin expiring soon," Ernest Istook ? a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation ? writes in the Washington Post. "The budget resolution moving through Congress is the blueprint for what's coming. Higher spending ? by hundreds of billions ? is the plan. Renewing tax cuts isn't."

Istook calls the expiration of the tax cuts in 2010 a "back-door tax increase" because the Democratic-controlled Congress doesn't have to act to usher in the increase ? it simply needs to take no action to extend the cuts or make them permanent, "something the new majority says it won't do." [Because they are gutless wonders!]

Last September, Democrat Charles Rangel of New York ? who is now chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee ? said in an interview that he "cannot think of one" of Bush's first-term tax cuts that merit renewal.

In a January interview with John Browne, contributing editor of NewsMax's Financial Intelligence Report, Rangel was again asked about the tax cuts. He indicated he was open-minded about the issue, but was noncommittal, saying: "That's 2010. What happens in 2010, happens in 2010, depending on what the economy looks like ? what the budget looks like?

"I for one just don't see how you can give tax cuts to the rich and just come to the Congress and ask them to put young people in harm's way and give tax cuts to the rich." [Blah, blah, blah- same old tired, untrue story.]

The tax cuts have not substantially reduced current tax revenues, according to a Heritage Foundation report in January, and economic growth rates have more than doubled since the 2003 cuts. But if the tax cuts are allowed to expire, the federal government will grab more than 1.5 percent of GDP a year in extra tax revenue by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Without the cuts, "personal and business income tax rates will climb," Istook writes.

"Capital gains taxes will go up. The death tax will have new life. The marriage penalty will once more punish husbands and wives. Child tax credits won't continue. And the alternative minimum tax will hit more and more middle-income workers. "The sneaky thing is that instead of voting to raise taxes and going on the record ? Congress won't have to do a thing. Taxpayers should keep their eyes focused on their own pockets. They're about to get picked."