[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.