Will They Ever Learn?

The sorry spectacle of the pork-laden bill containing extensions of the Bush-era tax rates demonstrates how little members of Congress have learned from the November election results.

You have liberals complaining about taxpayers making over $200K being given an undeserved break. They never seem to be able to grasp that fact that many independent businesspeople do business through LLC's or other entities that roll up into 1040 returns. Thus, what appears to be a very wealthy person is, in reality, a business' tax return.

These same liberals then castigate businesspeople for not hiring and expanding their businesses. With rates in limbo or set to rise, what's the incentive for the independent capitalist?

Meanwhile, middle-of-the-road Democrats larded on the pork to what should have been a simple tax bill. Ethanol subsidies were protected, unemployment benefit extensions were included without any countervailing budget cuts elsewhere, and even $1B for implementing Obamacare was stuffed into the bill.

I don't now know the exact tab for all of the extra spending, but Mitch McConnell, among others, reminded voters that this looked a lot like last year's Christmas Eve rush into voting of a health care bill so fresh that nobody could read its thousands of pages prior to the vote. This bill now runs to at least hundreds of pages, as well.

You'd think merely extending tax rates and maybe unemployment benefits, in the bargain, could be done in about two pages.

These people simply don't understand why voters are so outraged. Even a simple tax policy extension attracts earmarks and pork, with neither current House or Senate leaders, nor Wonderboy gutting all the extra padding and simply passing  the tax rate extensions.

Perhaps this is a sign that taxpayer and voter ire will remain raw and fresh well into the 2012 campaigns. They should.