Obama Refuses To Say He'd Veto Extension Of Bush Tax Cuts For Wealthy

[onehandle]

Source: Huffington Post/ABC

President Obama on Thursday refused to commit himself to vetoing legislation that would temporarily extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, even as he and his administration have steadfastly argued that such an extension would waste hundreds of billions of dollars.

In an interview with ABC News's George Stephanopoulos, the president was asked on four occasions whether his commitment to letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire was strong enough to veto even a "short term extension." On each occasion, Obama demurred.

The exchange, for what it's worth, was flagged by a Republican congressional aide who noted how little Democrats would likely feel emboldened by the remarks. It does, indeed, seem increasingly likely that Congress punts on the issue, passing a temporary extension of all Bush tax cuts with the goal of revisiting their expiration in two years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) has said he would be willing to discuss this compromise. And the lack of an overt veto threat from Obama suggests that the White House isn't willing to rule it out either.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/09/obama-refuses-to-say-hed-_n_710279.html

[BrklynLiberal]

1. ............................

x(

[Me.]

3. Sigh

[kentuck]

2. He wouldn't want to get his veto over-ridden...

But he probably has no idea how many in his own Party would vote with the Repubs to extend them?

[Cal33]

29. Wouldn't the blue dog Democrats of congress be afraid of

exposing themselves over this issue at this time?

[msongs]

4. Obama + fierce advocate = nothing nt

[BrklynLiberal]

5. Extending the tax cuts for the wealthy for even 1 day in NOT A COMPROMISE!!!

the word that comes to mind is CAPITULATION.

[indepat]

6. Reading the handwriting on the wall and the tea leaves, these tax cuts for the wealthy are not going

to be allowed to expire whereas the gutting of social security will proceed on schedule: pubs will rightfully be jumping with joy, seeing the keys to their agenda fulfilled under a Democratic administration and Democratic control of both houses of Congress. Sheesh! :)

[Me.]

7. So What Is His Position, Exacrly?

Yesterday in Ohio he said he wouldn't think of it. He needs to get his act together.

[NorthCarolina]

8. You have to cut him slack. He is in campaign mode right now

where statements are not intentions or promises, just rhetoric for the masses.

[Me.]

13. Here's The Problem

With that rhetoric if that's what it is, "a Republican congressional aide who noted how little Democrats would likely feel emboldened by the remarks. It does, indeed, seem increasingly likely that Congress punts on the issue, passing a temporary extension of all Bush tax cuts".

Now unless they're having secret meeting with Congress where he's saying, I didn't really mean it, it cuts the legs out from under them and, his remarks on Wednesday. More, it is dispiritong to the very base they are urging to get out and vote.

[No Elephants]

22. Remind me: When has he been out of campaign mode?

[NorthCarolina]

25. He laid pretty low

during the health insurance reform debates. He was out at the end....but virtually absent during the deliberation process, not really appearing until the issue of putting the Public Option to rest was sufficiently behind them. So, being out of sight is equivalent to being out of campaign mode.

[No Elephants]

35. Or, laying low until they killed the public option WAS being in campaign mode?

How many posts have I read here in the past year saying he was powerless to make sure it was in the bill? And, I believe at least some who post that actually believe it.

[LeFleur1]

12. Why Not Do This?

Why not give the extension to companies that actually provide a certain LARGE number of jobs in the USA (depending on company size)? Why give an extension to them before there is hiring done? We have learned from past experience that they just stuff the money in their pockets instead of creating jobs.
Why not give the extension to those companies that actually bring their jobs back to the USA?
Just extending the tax cuts will do nothing but make the rich richer and those out of work, out of work.
It is extremely disheartening to watch Obama out on the campaign trail, being charming, talking about change without using the word, acting as if he has stood up to the Republicans when it counted, not just on the campaign trail. The Republicans of today are never never going to work for the good of the country. As Hillary once said to him, "Enough with the words." He needs to get to work and stop traipsing around the country, pretending.
I talked with someone yesterday who said, "If this House, Senate and President extend the tax cuts, I'm through with the whole lot of them." I wonder how many people feel that way?
Maybe the voting process is so polluted they aren't afraid of the voters anymore.

[No Elephants]

23. Are the extensions for corporate income tax or individual income tax?

I've been under the impression it's the latter. The rhetoric has been "more cuts for millionaires (or the wealthy), fewer rules (meaning less regulation) for corporations."

[OhioChick]

17. Yep....

He did say that in Ohio....just yesterday.

What happened since then?

[Me.]

19. Quite

Do you think they don't know that people actually listen to what he says?

[OhioChick]

20. Apparently not...

No one in Ohio could've missed his comments yesterday. They were plastered all over the local news, websites, etc.

:wtf:

[Historic NY]

9. Oh its just the Huffing post..he can't veto what the congress doesn't have the votes for...

[onehandle]

10. Transcript:

(...)

STEPHANOPOULOS: How deep is your commitment to this fight? Are you saying that if Congress passes a short term extension of all the tax cuts, you're gonna veto it?

OBAMA: George, here's what … I'm saying is that we've got a fundamental choice about this economy. You can't have Republicans running on fiscal discipline that we're gonna reduce our deficit, that the debt's out of control, and then borrow tens, hundreds of billions of dollars to give tax cuts to people who don't need them. (crosstalk)

(...)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Does that mean you will veto an extension of tax cuts to the wealthy?

OBAMA: What I am saying is that if we are going to add to our deficit by $35 billion, $95 billion, $100 billion, $700 billion, if that's the Republican agenda, then I've got a whole bunch of better ways to spend that money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you're not saying you're gonna veto it.

OBAMA: I, there are a whole bunch better ways to spend the money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How come you don't want to say veto?

OBAMA: There are a whole bunch better ways to spend the money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Okay, but no veto yet. No veto threat yet. Let's take a broader look, heading into the Midterms. Our you just, you might have seen the, the latest ABC News poll, showing Republicans have a big advantage going into the election. And I'm just wondering when you look at what it says about your personal attributes, as well. More Americans seeing you as liberal. And when you ask questions like, "Does he share my values?" It's gone like this since you became President. What's your analysis of what that's about?

(...)

http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2010/09/president-obama-to-pastor-jones-stunt-endangers-troops-full-transcript-of-exclusive-interview.html#tp

[bluestateguy]

16. I just saw the clip. Looks a lot like a Gotcha job by George Snufalupagus

He's really gone Georgetown Cocktail Party since taking that job.

[No Elephants]

27. Well, you can't fool a George twice be he a Pub or a DLCer. Please see Reply 24.

Why can't Obama just say things like, "I'm not going to speculate about hypotheticals"? His perceived need to reply to everything, from questions about drunken remarks at the Grammies to this one is not working well for him.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

11. There is this possibility to consider;

he's playing politics. Why on earth would he commit to this action now, giving those who oppose time to gear up and fight it? Why not just mumble something nonsensical and then when it's time, do the right thing? It is possible for this to happen.............

[Doctor_J]

30. Pretty good thinking, ditwl

Fending off attacks from every last member of Big Media is not easy. I guess I will wait & see.

[No Elephants]

37. Yes, that's just what he did with the public option. Oh, wait. never mind.

[bluestateguy]

14. Then it's best to prevent such a scheme from coming up for a vote all together

Then this conundrum could be avoided.

[gratuitous]

15. And one of the better ways to do that is to promise a veto

But that would take some leadership, and we have to keep our powder dry in case there's a Big Important Issue that we really need to address in the next 10 years.

[Zorra]

18. Those cuts get extended and I'm done with the Democratic party.

I really, really wish that President Obama would have stood up and drawn a line in the sand here. It truly worries and distresses me greatly that he did not. I want to trust my President. I really need to have my mind put at ease on this issue. Because if these tax cuts get extended, it is going to have a profound effect on the course of my life. My life will be irrevocably altered, and what little faith I have left in this political system will be shattered.

I'm a yellowdog from birth, voted for the candidate with the (D) by their name in every election since I was of age, but for me, this is the deal breaker, the litmus test of the true heart of the President and Democratic legislators.

IMO, "Damn straight I'm gonna veto any extension of these tax cuts, that is my solemn promise to the nation, may God and the American people be my witnesses as I stand before you now!" would have been the appropriate response.

Any Dem legislator that votes to extend the cuts is nothing more than a no good dirty rotten shit covered republican lawn dwarf suck-whore familiar to plutocrat vampires. (I'm holding back and being nice about how I really feel here).

If they vote to extend the cuts and the President does not veto it, I guess that would place him as the Commander-in Chief of the no good dirty rotten shit covered republican lawn dwarf suck-whore familiars to plutocrat vampires. If it is necessary, and he vetoes the extension, he'll be a hero to me, it will be like he drove a stake through the hearts of the vampires that I've spent my time fighting against my whole life.

No lame-ass mealy mouth excuses can ever cover this one. It cannot be explained away. Moderate and liberal Democrats have already put up with more than enough fawning conservative Vichy Democrat capitulations to democracy killing republican assholes and their corporate masters.

If there is one thing that can be learned from a lifetime of progressive Democratic political activism, it is this:

The one and only place where it is possible for Democrats to meet republicans halfway is on the road to hell.

[Indydem]

28. How?

"Because if these tax cuts get extended, it is going to have a profound effect on the course of my life."

Why? How?

It is always interesting to me how the tax rates of someone else are going to affect your life?

If the repuke maggots get to keep their tax cuts, its the same ball of shit we are laready in. If you haven't found a way to life your life with the perpetual disappointment of spineless democrat politics, you really need to. Life is too short to let politics mess up your happiness.

[Zorra]

33. Thank you so much for asking!

First of all, the current Treasury Secretary explains better than me how the tax rates of someone else affects my life and those of my family, neighbors, friends as well as the majority of the American people. But this, actually, is only a small part of the reason my life will change.

(AP) Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday that extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy would be a $700 billion mistake.
snip---
Geithner said extending the tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers would cost $700 billion over a decade and $30 billion for a single year. He said wealthy families are more likely to save the money, which doesn't help the economy in the short run.

Geithner said allowing the tax cuts on the wealthy to expire would also help get the soaring deficits under control.

"Borrowing to finance tax cuts for the top 2 percent would be a $700 billion fiscal mistake," Geithner said. "It's not the prescription that the economy needs right now and the country can't afford it."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/04/politics/main6743882.shtml

There is a myriad of economic and socio-political factors regarding the current rapid polarization of wealth, other than what is described above, that affect my life and the lives of most people on the planet. If you are unaware of these factors, I recommend reading the following two books by Thom Hartmann, where these factors are explained in relative detail.

Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" -- And How You Can Fight Back

Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It

My life will change because I will view the action of Democrats extending the Bu*h tax cuts to people that have and use way more than they could possibly ever need to the detriment of most people on the planet and the planet itself as a total betrayal of the democratic principles that I genuinely believe in and have fought most of my life to maintain. For further clarification of these democratic principles, I will repost something that I wrote here a while back.

Robert Gibbs: "That's not reality". A message to Democratic legislators.
Posted by Zorra in General Discussion
Fri Aug 13th 2010, 04:26 PM

When Robert Gibbs said that what he called "the professional left" would be “satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare", and that this is not reality, then what does he consider "reality"?

Is his reality the belief that private commercial enterprise, in this case primarily the health insurance industry, has so much power over our government and political leaders that a universal public healthcare system is out of the question because private commercial enterprise will not allow this to be implemented?

Many polls have indicated that a substantial segment of the population, often a substantial majority of the population, is in favor of universal single payer healthcare.

So...if the people want this type of healthcare system, why can't we have it?

Seems Mr. Gibbs was admitting that our legislators actually do have to be concerned with making deals with private commercial enterprises and legislators that serve these enterprises in order to pass legislation, and that these deals made with private commercial enterprises can result in legislation that conflicts with the wishes and will of the people.

Obviously, this is not democracy.

It appears that we have corporate lords deciding what is best for us. Kind of like feudalism, where the will of wealthy royal landowners supercedes the needs of people.

Personally, I think this totally sucks. I want to have democratic government. I don't want profit seeking enterprises determining what I can and cannot have.

This is what I signed up for:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

I also signed up for this:

"and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

In my humble opinion, it is clearly imperative that our political leaders take action immediately, making it their utmost priority, to remove the corporate oligarchy from having any and all influence on our government, in order that government of, by, and for the people be restored. Lobbying by private commercial enterprise must be outlawed, and severe criminal penalties be imposed on anyone or anything (sorry, SCOTUS, but corporations are not persons) that offers any type of compensation to legislators in order to influence that legislators decision regarding legislative action, be that offer spoken, written, or implied.

Mr. Gibbs has just done us a big favor. He has, apparently unwittingly, let us know for sure that our vote no longer really counts, and that the wishes and needs of an ever growing more wealthy and powerful corporate oligarchy take precedence over the will of the people.

How naive and insolent it is of us to even consider having a Canadian style universal single payer healthcare system in America. Absurd. Utterly ridiculous.

I believe that Robert Gibbs believes that "reality" is legislating in accordance with what the corporate oligarchy will allow.

This concept of "reality" is absolutely not acceptable to democrats, and should not be acceptable to any Democrat, particularly the Democrats that I helped vote into office for the specific purpose of carrying out the will of the people.

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." FDR

Dear Democratic Legislator: Please, fix it.
-----
To continue:

I am quite certain that Democratic legislators fully understand that the Bu*h tax cuts have been detrimental to the majority of people of the US as well as to the functioning of the government and the overall health of the economy.

If Democrats extend the Bu*h tax cuts to the incredibly wealthy, and those tax cuts have already proven to be detrimental to the nation, and the Secretary of the Treasury, as well as most credible economic experts, are telling the Democratic legislators that it would be derimental to the well-being of the nation to extend these cuts, it would lead me to ask,

"Why the fuck are they extending these tax cuts?"

The only reasonable answer that I would be able to come up with is that these legislators have been compromised by wealthy special interests, and are acting solely in the interests of the economically super wealthy.

In which case, I will have no choice to believe that the Democratic party has become something almost completely counter to my need to foster and preserve democracy in this country, leading me to abandon the party that I have supported for so long, as well as me having to spend even more of my time and energy dismantling the plutarchy that may possibly enslave me at some point in my life but which will certainly enslave my children and grandchildren if I and those that are like-minded do not stop them or at least hold them at bay for a while.

I always believed that the Democratic party had, at the core, the mission of preserving democracy, that eventually the party would succeed in ousting the plutarchy, or at the very least, fight them tooth and nail. Yeah, I guess this is totally naive, but it is what I hoped for. Democrats extending the Bu*h tax cuts would extinguish all hope of this for me.

So it's just the proverbial last straw. Extending the Bu*h tax cuts would be a transparent, counterproductive, detrimental, and completely unnecessary action that would totally negatively affect me and most everyone in the country.

It would be kind of like Democrats laughing and spitting in all of our faces while lifting our wallets, and then merrily announcing that they have decided to merge with republican party once and for all.

For me, a betrayal of that magnitude, and the repercussions of the betrayal, counts as a seriously heavy life changing experience. I'm already tired of fighting, and having to start over again politically pretty much from scratch is literally mind-numbing. And yeah, I have learned to live my life and be a really happy person despite the compromised politics of some Democratic and all republican legislators, but don't believe that I would have been able to do so if I were not a small part of the dedicated group of people that has devoted so much time and energy to preserving the modicum of democracy and freedom we still have left, and I hope you are aware enough of history to realize that if people do not take steps to protect themselves from those greedy for wealth and power, then the greedy will inevitably enslave them. I mean, if you care about it, of course.

If Dems cut our throats now, regrouping is going to be a really dirty job. But someone has to do it...

"The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men." -Samuel Adams

[Lost4words]

38. very well said!

:hi: I salute you!

[Doctor_J]

32. Nice slogan at the end.

:thumbsup:

[Zorra]

34. That was inspired by madfloridian's post in GD about Lanny Davis.

It was the first thing that popped into my head after I read this.

These are a few of the quotes by Lanny Davis that madfloridian posted:

"If the Democrats lose the House and lose seats in the Senate, there may be a ray of sunshine out of the bad news for President Obama."
snip---
"So out of the deluge, if there is one, President Obama may be able to convince the Republicans, who are no longer the opposition party and now might be blamed for the country's unsolved economic and social problems and the budget deficits: It's time to put aside hyper-partisan politics and get back into the solutions business. Join me — and I will meet you more than halfway."

[democrat_patriot]

21. They will just expire. No vote. No veto.

Yes?

Or do they have to vote on keeping some (middle class) and letting the rest expire?

[No Elephants]

36. All cuts will expire unless some action is taken, be that a new bill for middle class or

an extension of the middle class cuts in the existing bill. Either way, they'll have to take a vote of some kind.

I wish they had included a provision about a middle class extension in the "health" bill. They needed only 50 + Biden to pass that.

[No Elephants]

24. Shades of the public option. Deja vu all over again, right smack in electiion season.

This should really GOTV of all those pesky dispirited Democrats

[robcon]

26. He won't veto.

His opposition to the tax breaks was just for appearances.

Obama is as committed to killing the tax breaks as his commitment to Public Option.

[Moondog]

31. Oh, great. Another Profile In Courage .... n/t