[jere]

Let's be clear here. The deal means the bush era tax cuts remain for most people (a 3 percentage point reduction for most brackets), while we lose a temporary payroll tax for 2%: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-28/breaking-down-the-c...

If I understand correctly, that means taxes should still be about 1% lower than they were during Clinton.

I love how every time a temporary tax cut expires, we call it a "tax hike." I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.

[smsm42]

It IS a tax hike. Tax rates increase. The basic fact is: now, in January, tax rates are higher than they were last month, in December. No amount of renaming and shifting blame changes this basic fact. Taxes have gone up. Yes, there were times where taxes were even higher, so what? There also were times where women weren't allowed to vote, but we don't call denying a woman right to vote now "return to Lincoln-era freedoms", do we?

You can claim raising taxes is actually good and not a big deal. That's your opinion and you are entitled to it. You can not claim there was no tax hike - you're not entitled to your own facts.

>>> I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.

Yet no news about any meaningful spending cuts - so far they just kicked the can down the road, as if anything will be different in two months.

[jere]

>You can not claim there was no tax hike - you're not entitled to your own facts.

Words have connotations too. Frankly, I don't know how to look up connotations so I can't be sure something isn't just in my head. But when I hear "hike", if nothing else "intentional" comes to mind. The automatic expiration of a tax cut doesn't seem to fit.

And I'll reiterate the question posed to Steko: do you call it a "price hike" when a sale ends?

[smsm42]

Of course it's intentional. If they didn't intend for taxes to go up, they would not vote for legislation that is doing so. In fact, they did it twice - in 2010 andin 2012 - so they fully intended that there be a tax hike in 2013.

>>>> do you call it a "price hike" when a sale ends?

Of course. "Sale" is a marketing construct, there's no price but the actual deal price. Claiming that there's some other price, which just now, just for you, just this 5 minutes is not valid and another, much lower price, is now in effect but you have to hurry to buy it - is just a marketing trick. Amazon is running with "sale price" for decades now, and most of its "base prices" are pure fiction, and so do many other retailers. It is, obviously, very effective marketing trick - you fell for it completely and so do many others - but a trick nonetheless. There's no price but actual sale price. "End of sale" is a price hike.

[jere]

>Of course it's intentional. If they didn't intend for taxes to go up, they would not vote for legislation that is doing so.

Are we talking about the same thing? Because I thought we were discussing a law that would automatically expire without intervention.

If there was no legislation being voted on right now, it would still expire.

[smsm42]

"automatically" is bullshit - the Congress is (was) capable of stopping it at any moment if they only wanted to do so. Inaction is a decision as well as action, otherwise setting off a bomb would be an unintentional act - I just pressed a button and failed to cancel it until it exploded, but since it exploded "automatically" it is unintentional. Nobody in right mind would buy this, but you're buying the "automatically" thing for some reason.

It just makes it easier to fool people - they fooled you, for example - into thinking they had no choice because it's somehow "automatic". They had all choice in the world, and "automatic" means nothing but saying "this would happen unless we create a law to do otherwise" - which is true for 100% of laws created by Congress, they all happen unless Congress creates another law that says the contrary. They are all "automatic" and all intentional.

[IgorPartola]

If I lend you a chainsaw today, and tell you that I'll need it back tomorrow that's temporary. If I come to collect it tomorrow, you cannot tell me that I'm taking something that you own away from you.

If you were thinking of those tax cuts as permanent, why didn't you and your representatives make them permanent ahead of time?

[anonymoushn]

If they were permanent, the CBO would have to make projections assuming they are permanent. It's much easier for me to borrow your chainsaw every day than to ask you to give it to me, because then I can tell you you'll have it back tomorrow.

As it is, the CBO is able to make projections involving the cuts expiring next year each year for over a decade now. This time the projection turned out to be more correct than usual, which is to say still wrong.

[IgorPartola]

Right. If you ask me every day for my chainsaw and I give it to you, and one day I decide that I need it and you cannot use it, it's your issue that you can't get your project done. Your projection was wrong.

Now, if you had reason to believe (say, a contract) that my chainsaw will be available to you every day for three years, yes you can count on it. Otherwise you cannot.

Perhaps we shouldn't have "temporary" tax cuts at all. Why is it that something that was good 10 years ago is all of a sudden not good now? It's not like the "permanent" tax cuts or hikes are really permanent: the government can revise the tax code fairly frequently.

[Steko]

The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me. It's a bit linkbaity, yes. The payroll tax holiday was a stimulus measure that was never meant to be permanent, yes. We should not compound the long term issues with social security by chronically underfunding it, yes.

It's a hike and one I'm perfectly happy to live with. As a commenter at metafilter put it:

Well, it's that or more ice floes to put the old folk on, and the ice industry isn't making any production gains either.

[jere]

>The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me.

I'm not so sure. If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month. Maybe it's just me, but hike has a very specific connotation that isn't appropriate here.

[Steko]

There's a subtle difference between a companies prices and taxes. If I only bought from one store every week and for 10 years I paid $1 for a loaf of bread and one day the bread cost $2 I would still feel justified in calling that a 100% price hike regardless of whether they had announced that the $1 price was temporary 10 years ago. I'll admit there's some wiggle room to argue price hike or not but I don't feel as if I'm the one jumping through all the hoops to make my case.

Full disclosure: I normally pay around $4 for a loaf of bread.

[smsm42]

Of course it is. "50% off this month only" is exactly the same, in money terms, as "we intend to raise price of it 100% next month". Of course, the former sounds much better, which is why you never see the latter, even though it is exactly the same thing. People have very hard time applying logic to money, for some reason.

[chimeracoder]

> If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month.

No, but if they had that "sale" for over 10 years, rather than one month, then you might call it a price increase.

[jere]

You do realize the payroll tax cut only lasted 2 years, right? Not only that, but I'm fairly certain it was enacted partly to counteract the recession, which by definition should only be temporary.

In the context of historically low taxes (the top rate used to be 94% and is now 35%), I think the sale analogy is much more apt.

[gonepostal]

The Bush era tax cuts were also never meant to be permanent. That is why calling it a tax hike is disingenuous at best.

[smsm42]

So tax hike is not a tax hike if you plan it upfront? So if your employer says to you "you're getting a raise of $1000 for this year, but only for one year" it is not the same as getting a raise of $1000 and then getting a pay cut of $1000 next year? And the difference is... what exactly? That it was known upfront? How it makes anything different?

[jere]

>So if your employer says to you "you're getting a raise of $1000 for this year, but only for one year"

That's called a bonus and there's quite a difference. There's also a difference between a one year contract and getting laid off unexpectedly after one year.

You really don't get the practical difference?

[smsm42]

Bonus is one-time and usually contingent, salary raise is increasing each paycheck and unconditional. But you can, of course, have a bonus which is unconditional, in which case it's just a pay raise.

>>>> There's also a difference between a one year contract and getting laid off unexpectedly after one year.

There is, but not in money. You could, for example, look in advance for the next gig if you knew. Since there's no way to prepare in advance for higher taxes that would make any difference (not for salarymen - for investors, they already did - tons of companies paid early dividends in 2012, sometimes borrowing to finance it), so it makes no practical difference at all.

[gte910h]

The reason some people don't want to call it a hike is that the passing of the law didn't cause it, it was a sunset baked into the old law.

[Steko]

Arguing over labels is a red herring. Is it a hike? Maybe. Who cares? Many reasonable people might say it's a hike, so don't hide from that or try and split hairs. At the end of the day it's the right thing to do... so do it, even if it's a hike.

[gte910h]

I think the left has taken this approach in America, and let the right repeatedly pick the worst labels for EVERYTHING from the left's perspective.

It's called framing.

[Steko]

There's framing debates and there's Bill Clinton arguing about the meaning of the word 'is'. Sometimes you got to know when you're doing the former and when you're tilting at windmills. I also think the right's perceived advantage here is heavily overstated.

[gte910h]

The Bill Clinton "is" thing is a bit like the hot coffee lawsuit: When you look at the details, it's quite a bit less silly then the news made it seem

The Paula Jones lawyers deposed Clinton earlier with a ridiculous definition of sexual relations, the judged chopped it down way too far, and Clinton didn't answer one more bit then he had to because they kept leaking shit, and no one answers more than they have to in a deposition.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-105hdoc311/pdf/GPO-CDO... for the grand jury testimony about all this. Look at page 454 by searching to read the start of it.

All that said, yes, there is a point where definition of a word doesn't really matter. So yes, I agree with you, George Bush hiked the taxes on Jan 1 2013 on the upper class due to a expiration clause on a tax bill, and the Republicans opted not to renew the payroll tax holiday Obama got in exchange for a 2 year extention of the Bush Tax Cuts. They did not agree to extend these cuts when he did not agree to continued extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the highest wage income earners.

[hnwh]

> I don't see how we can ever fix the debt if no one is willing to pay more taxes and no one is willing to lose benefits.

I dunno.. maybe stop bombing every country on the planet that hates us for our freedom..? Just a thought..