Fiscal Cliff 2013: Democrats' Hypocrisy on Full Display

The hypocrisies and flip-flops have stacked up so high for the Democrats, I’ve lost count.

Watching the fiscal cliff negotiations progress has revealed many inaccuracies and double standards that have gone largely unnoticed by the liberal mainstream media. For starters, when George W. Bush was president, then Senator Barack Obama rightfully described the reckless spending going on in Washington when speaking out against raising the federal debt ceiling yet again in 2006, “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

Even when running for President in 2008, Obama continued revealing the truth that we can’t keep borrowing from foreign creditors to saddle future generations with debt and bankruptcy from our reckless spending practices:

But the Democrats are in power now. Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and other leaders of the Democratic Party were completely against spending more and borrowing more money to do it, unless it’s their spending and their borrowing. Now they’re demanding a blank check: more spending, more stimulus (or “investment” as they like to call it), and an infinite debt ceiling. How quickly things change once they’re calling the shots.

Then on taxes, during the debt ceiling negotiations last year, President Obama rightfully identified over a trillion dollars worth of loopholes and deductions which could be closed to raise revenues without raising tax rates and pushing more jobs and money overseas when we already have the highest corporate tax rate in the world:

Hmmm, that’s funny. That’s exactly what House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Congressional Republicans are asking for. That’s also what bipartisan groups across the board from Simpson-Bowles to the Gang of Six have advocated.

But the far left Democrats in leadership have been insistent on accepting nothing short of raising tax rates on millionaires and billionaires all year long. That’s all we heard from them on taxes throughout this campaign, “millionaires and billionaires don’t need tax breaks," "millionaires and billionaires aren’t paying their fair share," "millionaires and billionaires need to do more."

Of course, they don’t mention the fact that this has been tried countless times throughout history, never producing the desired effects. Even today, the British government decided to raise the tax rate on their top income earners all the way to 50%. Not only did Britain’s revenues plunge afterwards, but two-thirds of their millionaires disappeared. Before the tax hike, 16,000 Brits reported an income of over £1 million. After the tax hike, that number fell to 6,000.

So now Boehner is offering raising tax rates on millionaires and billionaires back to Clinton levels, exactly what Democrats have been asking for all along. And Senate Democrats are threatening to shoot it down and forced to finally admit their lie. While “millionaires and billionaires” make for a snazzy sound bite, they’re now eating their words when forced with action.

They know how pointless raising tax rates on millionaires and billionaires is. Millionaires and billionaires are far more capable of changing their taxable income by hiring attorneys, accountants, offshore bankers, etc. They can change the location, timing, composition and volume of income to avoid taxation, and it’s happened over and over again throughout history here and abroad. It’s always the middle class that gets screwed when tax rates go up, including small business owners, job creators, and entrepreneurs.

My father is a small business owner. Although the overhead easily takes the lion’s share of his income and he lives in a side-gabled one story bungalow, he makes over $250K on paper (which is not his take home pay), so according to far left Democrats, he’s “rich.”

Obama repeatedly claims to be all for a balanced approach to debt and deficit reduction when giving speeches, but he and his administration have pushed for anything but. He wants to double down on the same Keynesian economic policies that he’s implemented since Day 1: more spending, more taxes, more bureaucratic control. Then, he asked for $1.2 trillion in revenue through closing loopholes and limiting deductions. When the House GOP offered that, he demanded we raise tax rates on millionaires and billionaires instead. Now that the House GOP is offering that, Senate Democrats are threatening to shoot it down because “it doesn’t go far enough.”

Meanwhile, I’ve heard zilch from Democrats on solving the main drivers of our debt: entitlement programs, high spending levels, and expanding government. And I’m supposed to believe that Obama is “meeting Republicans halfway” while Boehner isn’t as he faces ouster threats from his own party and other conservative groups?

You know what’s the most ironic aspect of all this? For years, some of us have tried to hold lawmakers in Washington accountable for their reckless spending and subsidizing of special interest campaign donors, but the majority of Americans keep re-electing the same people because they want to believe all the unsustainable promises they’ve made on the campaign trail despite the fact that all the tax hikes on the rich you want to make couldn’t cover these gaping deficits. The truth is most Americans want to believe there’s such thing as a free lunch. They’ll elect the candidate who promises them the most “free stuff” and they don’t care who else has to pay for it (the rich, the Chinese, etc.).

Quite honestly, the best thing to do would be to let Democrats take us over the cliff and finally force all Americans to start paying for the irresponsible spending they keep voting for through higher taxes.