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Air Date: January 3, 2013
Host: Jim Schneider
Guest: Robert Romano
The Senate passed the latest fiscal cliff legislation by a margin of 89-8 after having only 3 minutes to read over the 154 page bill. Now that its contents are law, what does it contain? Here’s a brief synopsis of the legislation from the perspective of Jim’s guest, Robert Romano, the Senior Editor with Americans for Limited Government.
Robert began by saying that we’re in “…wonderland right now where up is down, down is up and a tax increase is a tax cut.” In fact, he noted that everyone will be paying 2% more in F.I.C.A taxes around the middle of this month.
Another increase he spoke of concerns those making over $400,000 and couples over $450,000 who will be seeing their rates go up to about 40%. That category includes many small businesses, so Robert considers these higher taxes to be nothing more than a recipe for higher unemployment.
The above scenario was described as part of President Obama’s alleged “balanced approach” to deficit reduction. True, the president got the rate he wanted but according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this will only produce about 30 billion in revenue in 2013 which falls far short of the 1.2 trillion dollars in new debt the government plans on accumulating.
Throw in the tax credits and “pork” loaded into the final version of the fiscal cliff bill and it’s no wonder Robert feels that rather than governing financially by an appropriations process we’re governing by continuing resolution and to challenge the latter will only get you accused of trying to shut the government down.
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