Weird Turn On Fiscal Cliff: GOP Plan Would Hike Taxes On Working Class So High-Income People Can Pay Less

Somehow, the fiscal cliff tax debate has taken a truly strange turn. No, not the politics, which long ago became a parody of Washington deal-making at its worst. It is the policy that has gotten strange: Democrats and Republicans seem hell-bent on protecting millions of high-income people from deficit-cutting tax hikes.

What strange turn?  Does Forbes not know that both Obama and the Republicans want to protect the amorphous middle class?

However you come down on this, it is fair to say that when it comes to taxes working class families may well end up worse off next year than they are today. So may millionaires. But households making between $200,000 and $1million may be largely protected from tax hikes. Does that really sound like a sensible and fair way to cut the deficit?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/be…

There is a real bite in that middle class palaver introduced by the Clintons and the DLC.  You may want to pray to God, if you know of any, that granny’s demise from falling off the cliff isn’t hastened by another famous Obama deal.

Best,  Terry

http://thinkgeoenergy.com/arch…

The son of a Kenyan father prefers fossil fuels or nukes for light and heat like most all Americans.

I don’t know how much heat is needed to grow roses in Kenya.  It wouldn’t seem to be much, not as much as a greenhouse in Iceland growing bananas but it is cheap either way.

They also grow roses with geothermal heat in New Mexico.  Lots of roses and other things. And now they will have power too.

New Mexico utility plans with 10 MW geothermal PPA

http://thinkgeoenergy.com/arch…

TenMW may not sound like much to today’s megathinkers but this is low temperature, distributed geothermal power that is available most anywhere and never quits on you like wind and solar do.

The wind and solar worshipers deny it even exists.

When will they ever learn?

– Never, probably.

Mother Earth will probably have start afresh like she did 250 million years ago after the Great Dying.

Then maybe Mother can evolve an intelligent species.

Best,  Terry

Yeah, another shooting.  This one in an elementary school in Newton, MA.  One shooting that struck even closer to home for us was across the country at a shopping Mall in Happy Valley, OR.  Yeah I know they call it Portland but we lived in a trailer court in or near  Happy Valley when we were first married.

It was a happy valley then.  Probably the same number of loons but not so many semi-automatic guns with huge capacity clips.  There was no FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh and…

Oh there were plenty of gun nuts but it just wasn’t the same.

The most dire threat to the kiddies and their progeny comes from those leading us to a hellish future, from the Koch denialists to the Obama temporalists to the sun and wind worshipers.

And I suggest the last is not the least.

Sorry, Terry. I do not find your claims credible.

From a desultory discussion in comments at the end of

http://www.renewableenergyworl…

My comments were just facts, not arguments.

In response to the usual fanciful figuring of an imagined continent-wide smart grid, selective weather data and wildly overbuilt wind farms, I pointed to the words of Rep. Jerry McNerny (D-CA), mathematics Ph.D. and wind energy entrepreneur, supporting baseload renewable energy.

Might as well have written on the wind.

It is akin to the Japanese seriously planning [seriously] an armada of solar satellites beaming energy down to earthlings like Scotty used to beam down the crew of the Enterprise.  Meanwhile, of course, the nukes were about to fall down, go boom.  How would Japanese know of the threats of nuclear energy?

You just can’t talk to crazy people.

Shouldn’t give them semi-automatic rifles with large clips.  Actually the shooter in Happy Valley stole his gun from a neighbor.  Best the neighbor of crazy people not have semi-automatic guns with large clips IMO.

But worst of all, by far the worst of all, is trying to talk to sane, concerned people with a closed mind.

“Bad” Bob is a contributor to Huffington Post where he misleads other innocents in the wind and solar cult.

Best,  Terry

I am a NC Pork Producer and we produce renewable energy from our swine waste

I am also interested in a small solar farm.

http://www.renewableenergyworl…

I guess it’s to be expected that a pig farmer would want to join his pigs at the trough to chow down on huge subsidies for the worst dilettante of renewable energy but mightn’t stinkless pig farming producing abundant baseload [always on] energy and/or fertilizer have some attraction even without the government trough?

See Pig city – zero emission and odour-free pig production Project

http://agrotech.dk/en/projects…

The last time I had looked in on Pig City it was a small experimental venture utilizing air filters to screen out ammonia, the primary cause of stench in all livestock farming.  The ammonia was then used for growing tomatoes but can be burned for generating electricity as well.

Pigs are not bearcats, you know.  

Bearcats’ butts are said to smell like buttered popcorn though admittedly I never smelled a bearcat’s butt and have no idea if their shit smells the same.  What I do know about all too well is the stench of pig shit.  It is the worst.

I also have no knowledge of any government subsidies for Pig City but it is surely a more worthwhile venture than another dubious solar farm.

Best,  Terry

[Hint: There isn’t any.]

One of the Great Untold Stories of the past few decades was the fall of the murderous “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, when she proposed a modified head tax.

Thatcher could sail with aplomb above the increasingly nasty reputation of the English in Europe for her extrajudicial killings and mass imprisonment with little ceremony of the revolting Irish, especially with the full backing of the “World’s Greatest Power” across the big drink.

But the attack on les miserables even despite the inability of the voiceless ones to speak up for themselves sunk the old battleaxe.

Surprisingly fast.

In England of all places.

Maybe if England hadn’t lost the gift of poetry and lyrical literature that once stood her so well…

There has been an abortive destruction of the ham-handed Republicans, who had preveiously been raised from the grave by one of their own under a different label with a skillful ability to croon the old siren songs without shame.

We are obviously headed back towards the reign of a new and far more skillful Iron Lady if the stars foretelling the future are not giving a false signal.

Not looking good at all for working folk, the very young, the aged and the sick.

Then again it never did – ever.

Best,  Terry

First remove the trough of federal spending from moocher states as requested by their tea party majorities to save the income of hard-working people in giver states.

Such states could include Texas* as well as others such as West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arizona, Tennessee.

With such a bounty one might as well give a tax break to hard-working people of giver states and make an exception for such as the majority African-American congressional district that has elected a pale Jew to Congress.  Such extraordinary intelligence and morality should qualify for an especially high bonus in federal spending and tax forgiveness.

*Texas is claimed to be giver state instead of a moocher state but who can believe that and who cares even if it is true?

Eliminate ACA and convert to universal one-payer health care.  The savings in dollars and increase in health and life expectancy will be immense.  Unemployed unskilled health insurance executives should be able to find work emptying bed pans in hospitals that will now be filled to capacity.  They could be supervised by insurance clerks who once made medical diagnoses and prescribed treatment rather than doctors.  Other former employees of the insurance companies should be able to find employment as lobbyists, writers of fantasy explanations for the failings of the “capitalist” system blamed on Adam Smith of all people, orderlies in recovery establishments for former tea partiers and rightwing pundits,

produce pickers will be needed to replace Latinos free to work at better jobs.  The list is endless.

The federal debt should turn into a surplus in no time.

Best,  Terry

Washington should stop fighting the “fiscal phantom” of the deficit and start worrying about the coming “austerity bomb,” warns Paul Krugman in his New York Times column.

http://www.moneynews.com/Stree…

This seems to me a rather odd place to find economic wisdom.  Rightwing rags, which I take this to be, are not notable for truthfulness in my experience.

Sure liberal websites are full of Krugman but they are also heavily contaminated with the atrocious nonsense about the need to cut the deficit in the midst of a depression.

How this translates into no need to worry about the fiscal cliff is beyond my simple mind.

Cutting to the quick:

The real danger, according to Krugman, is the “austerity bomb,” otherwise known as the fiscal cliff, the tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled for next year.

A rose by any other name is a rose.  So is a skunk.

If anyone knows of a single elected politician, even an Alan Grayson, who warns we should increase, not lower, the current deficit, I would love to know his or her name and see evidence of this heresy from establishment religion.

I would expect such a man or woman would be quickly eliminated from Congress at the first opportunity voters have to do so.  That was the case with two formerly impregnable senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who dared vote against the Vietnam War – the only two out of the whole damn Congress.  [I am talking of LBJ’s concocted Tonkin Gulf Resolution.  The Vietnam War had been going on a very long time.  Gruening was even eliminated by later peacenik hero, Mike Gravel, in a primary.]

True prophets have been known to lose their heads.

For what good?

Ummm, I dunno but I like such martyrs for my own twisted reasons I am unable to explain.  Perhaps it comes from being a Vietnam veteran before there was even a Vietnam War.

Best,  Terry

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the highest ranked House Republican woman, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Republicans need to become more “modern” but not “moderate.”

“I don’t think it’s about the Republican Party needing to become more moderate; I really believe it’s the Republican Party becoming more modern,” she said. “And whether it’s Hispanics, whether it’s women, whether it’s young people, the Republican Party has to make it a priority to take our values, to take our vision to every corner of this country.”

“I think it’s more about the messenger and who’s communicating our values to every corner of this country.”

http://livewire.talkingpointsm…

I can see it all now:

Cathy Rodgers to young Latina: ¿Cómo te va, señorita? Estoy aprendiendo español y no lo habla bien. ¿Le gustaría convertirse en un republicano?

Senorita: Hueles mal, perra. Váyase.

Ms. Rodgers:  Gracias.  I am sure Sen. Rubio will be happy to translate for me.  Some of the words don’t seem to be in my Republican Spanish Dictionary.

My unauthorized translation of senorita: [You stink, bitch. Go away.]

I suspect a Mormon missionary would have better luck with that conversion thing.

Best,  Terry