President Obama appeared confident and at times defiant today at a White House press conference where he defended his compromise agreement with Congressional Republicans that not only insures that the wealthiest Americans will continue to enjoy a tax cut for the next two years, but also raised an exemption on the estate tax as well.
Liberals across the land have denounced the deal, and that includes Democratic members of Congress, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has not come out in support of the deal. Pelosi said this today:
"The tax proposal announced by the president clearly presents the differences between Democrats and Republicans. Any provision must be judged by two criteria: does it create jobs to grow our economy and does it add to the deficit?
“The Democratic provisions will create jobs and help 155 million workers through tax cuts for the middle class, helping working families who are struggling and growing the economy. The Republican demands would provide tax cuts to the millionaires and billionaires, fail to create jobs and increase the deficit.”
"To add insult to injury, the Republican estate tax proposal would help only 39,000 of America’s richest families, while adding about $25 billion more to the deficit.Republicans have held the middle class hostage for provisions that benefit only the wealthiest 3 percent, do not create jobs, and add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit."
Obama said that even though the American public was on his side in being against tax cuts for the rich (based on public opinion polls), that didn't matter, because the Republicans had announced that they wouldn't act upon any other pieces of legislation until the tax issue was resolved. The president called it the Republicans' "Holy Grail," and said he wasn't going to let the American people be held hostage as he fought the GOP on the issue.
Although Democrats are angry, some of that anger needs to be directed toward themselves, as well as at the White House. That's because the deadline for the tax cuts expiring has always been known, and yet the urgency to try to get a deal in say, the summertime, never evolved. Though Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can get angry at Obama, they also held the leverage then that they lost overnight after last month's election, in which the Republicans crushed the Democrats.
GOP leaders have said that when the American public voted so overwhelmingly for Republicans last month, it's because they favored the GOP's stance on the tax issue. Actually, they "said" no such thing, though analysts have interpreted the vote as a rebuke against health care and the federal stimulus plan passed by Obama and the Democrats.
But as the president said during his news conference, public opinion has been with him and the Democrats in the fight over re-instating the tax rates that existed under President Bill Clinton, who, it should be noted, had the economy humming at a pretty good rate throughout most of the 1990s.
Because extending the tax cuts will cost the treasury so much money ($900 billion in total), apparently some Republicans are not certain if they'll approve the deal, at least according to a report in the New York Times.
Obama's theme in his press conference was that with so many Americans struggling economically right now, he wasn't going to continue to play a game of chicken with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and perhaps get a worse deal when the GOP-controlled House takes over next month.
"This is not an abstract thought," he told reporters and the country "…there are folks right now who are just barely making it on the paycheck that they've got, and when that check gets smaller on Jan. 1 they're going to have to scramble."
With so many liberals accusing Obama of wilting to GOP pressure, the president said he had news for them: not everybody thinks like they do. Actually he said that "this is a big diverse country…the NY Times editorial page doesn't permeate across the country — neither does the Wall Street Journal's…" before saying that the country was founded on compromise.
He brought up the issue that upset many liberals and Democrats last year — the exclusion of a government-run public option in the health care legislation. Conservatives loathe that bill, but many activists Democrats have criticized it with almost the same amount of vigor, because of the fact that the public option was never apparently considered to be part of the final legislation. Obama said some people were angry that something that might have helped a few million was cut out of the bill, yet the fact that more than 30 million new people will have access to health care was somehow not seen as significant.
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2010.