[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.