The Tax Rate & Unemployment Insurance Deal

The recent Congressional-White House deal to retain tax rates for two more years on all incomes, in exchange for 13 more months of unemployment insurance, strikes me as just more business as usual in Washington.

I know many will credit the Republicans with forcing the tax rate hikes, due to lapsing cuts from 2001, two years into the future.

But only temporarily delaying their expiration- again- and allowing yet another unprecedented extension of unemployment insurance benefits, doesn't fix anything. It simply expands the deficit from the latter spending.

Couldn't the GOP members of Congress have at least insisted on offsetting spending cuts for the unemployment benefits? I'm all for helping the needy, but the US taxpayer and government budget is not a bottomless pit. We're so clearly at a point of requiring spending ceilings and tradeoffs that this would have been an ideal time for the GOP to stick to that point.

Instead, voters see more of the same old games. Dangling temporary tax cuts while borrowing or taxing them to transfer their wealth to those who aren't creating value.

Hardly the dynamic US economy that so enriched our nation for generations.