It seems so long ago. But it really was just last month. America teetered on the brink of the fiscal cliff and the world held its collective breath to see whether we – the “greatest” country the world has ever seen – could get our shit together and come up with something that was, for a change, not worthy of scorn from countries like Greece and late-night talk show comedians.
As you know, that didn’t happen. Because, rather than deal with the problem, our Elected Officials in their wisdom avoided the whole thing by 1) deferring the spending cuts decision into the next Congress, the 113th, and, 2) passing the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.”
This pass the monkey game the House and Senate plays should be something we’ve gotten used to by now. I, for one, have not and am at a complete loss as to why we have a grand total of 535 legislators who can’t do anything they say they’re going to. By kicking the spending can down the road a few months the Republican controlled House, you know, those fiscal conservative, small-government, tea baggers hell bent on preserving the Union as our founding fathers intended it to be, have single-handedly caused some fifteen billion dollars in spending that would otherwise not have taken place had they allowed the legislation they had already passed simply to take effect.
Talk about sticking to their guns.
What this means is that they now have to do it all over again before March – AKA: Two weeks from now – a length of time which in current legislative parlance is known as: “absurd”. Now, much has been made of the current Congress’ apparent reasonableness in dealing with things like the debt ceiling and other pieces of heavy-hitter legislation like the American Liberty Restoration Act, the Beyond the Soup Kitchen Grants Program Act of 2013, and the Congress is Not a Career Act – just to pick a few out of A, B, and C. But, in fact, of the 482 pieces of legislation introduced in the first six weeks of the 113th Congress, exactly four have been passed and four have been sent to the Senate.
But, hey, they’ve got two weeks to solve the nation’s spending, borrowing, and tax problems. They could still pull it off.
Or just kick it down the road again at the cost of another fifteen billion.
At this point I’d like you to take a breather and note that all of my highlighted links this week are pointing back to the original U.S. government websites as opposed to the fringe-element, whack-job, hidden-agenda, conspiracy-theorist places I normally turn to for “facts.” Not that I don’t think that the tree-hugger, gun-toting, organically grown, strict-interpretation, free-speach-and-range wingnuts found at the extreme edges of the political spectrum aren’t fun or useful anymore, but, hey, this is supposed to be an entertaining blog. So, this week I decided to go straight to the horse and find out what the psychopathic egomaniacs running the country are really up to rather than toning it down by getting information passed through the filters on the radical fringes of the webiverse.
But the real fun is to take a look back – low these many month – and see what stunts our elected officials pulled to avert the fiscal cliff and thereby save the global economy. To do that you have to go have a look at the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) and read the fine print. I joke. You don’t have to read the fine print because you already know what the ATRA does: it extends the “Bush Era tax cuts” and “raises taxes on those making over $400,000 a year.” I mean we all know that. It’s all we heard from the Newsertainment Industry for those breathless months as our Casey-at-the-wheel-no-brakes-and-the-throttle’s-stuck-wide-open government hurtled hell-bent toward the cliff.
Luckily, thanks to ATRA, we swerved (to the left, ironically, thanks to the Republicans) at the last minute and all was saved.
Whew!
So we all know about ATRA.
Except.
The tax cut extensions and new tax rates for the embarrassingly rich among us are less than the tip of the ATRA iceberg. They are barely the penguin standing on the tip. Because, you see, our legislators told us a little fib. Now, they did what Fox News told us, but they also did so much more.
More which, as you might imagine, is going to cost you money.
The ATRA, as published online by the Government Printing Office, is 154 pages. Of those pages, one is for the title page, four are for the table of contents, and the remaining 149 go into the nuts and bolts of the tax changes.
Sort of.
In fact, when you look at the table of contents, you’ll see that the aforementioned tax changes take up a grand total of four – count ‘em – lines. Not paragraphs, not pages; lines. Now those four lines, Called Title I, do expand into some 20 pages of text that is the basis for all the “news” coverage of ATRA. Which, just for the arithmetically challenged among us – say, me – means that the remaining 120 pages are about the things which didn’t make the news yet still need to be paid for.
So why are these things on the other pages there? Well, in Title II, the so-called “Individual Tax Extenders,” some of them are extensions of existing programs that make sense to keep in the current economic climate – things like the mortgage interest deduction, and the State and local sales tax deduction. Plus they decided to give teachers a break by extending the deduction they can make for having to buy classroom supplies out-of-pocket, you know the pencils, paper, and protractors that the school district is supposed to pay for. You’ll note that none of these nine line items of Title II “extend” a single “tax”, but, rather, extend tax deductions.
Then there is Title III.
Title III is concerned with “Business Tax Extenders” and, as with Title II, no taxes are involved, only tax credits. Sadly, we’re going to have to go back to Taxes 101 and see what that means. A “tax deduction”, as in Title II, allows you to deduct an amount from your income and not pay taxes on it. A “tax credit”, on the other hand, allows you to take that amount directly off your tax bill; which means the government pays for it.
Remember: Individual = deduction, business = credit.
It is in Title III that the horse-trading needed to get Titles I and II into law took place. Every piece of legislation has some extraneous items in it; things that at first glance don’t have anything to do with the primary goal of the bill, or, if they do, manage at best a tenuous connection. This is how the legislators pay back the corporations and special interests that fund the election campaigns of those same “public servants.” So while Title III extends the tax credits of some worthy programs like “employer wage credit for employees who are active duty members of the uniformed services” it also provides for a “railroad track maintenance credit,” a “mine rescue team training credit,” and, my personal favorite, the “7-year recovery period for motorsports entertainment complexes.” Yay, NASCAR.
There are, in fact, thirty-one line items in the business-targeted Title III – two and a half times as many as in Titles I and II for individuals. Section 317 throws a bone to the film and TV industry, Section 324 lets small business owners off the hook for taxes when they sell out, and Section 329 exempts rum producers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands – undrinkable swill that it might be – from having to pay excise taxes.
It goes on.
Title IV is on Energy. Title V on Unemployment. Title VI is Medical with some forty-four provisions to keep doctors and hospitals happy. Title VII extends the farm subsidies that are keeping you from having to pay what your food is actually worth and also keeping food more expensive than it needs to be – a stunt only the government could pull off. This is the title that also averted the so-called “Milk Cliff”, which would have seen a doubling of dairy prices. It also authorizes a few dollars – 400 million of them – to help with the drought. Title VIII: “Miscellaneous” tips us away from the WWIII cliff by amending the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 by changing “that” for “whether” and inserting the word “strategic”. Whew! It also freezes the pay for members of Congress – or so they want you to think. In actuality, Section 802, titled: “NO COST OF LIVING ADJUSTMENT IN PAY OF MEMBERS OF CONGRESS” actually states that “no adjustment shall be made” to “cost of living adjustments for Members of Congress.” There will be no adjustment of the adjustment.
Like I said.
And lastly we come to Title IX where the fiscal cliff can is kicked down the road in Section 902. It is here that our fearless leaders passed their monkey: “POSTPONEMENT OF BUDGET CONTROL ACT SEQUESTER FOR FISCAL YEAR 2013.—Section 251A of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 is amended— (1) in paragraph (4), by striking ‘January 2, 2013’ and inserting ‘March 1, 2013’.”
See how easy it is?
Luckily we only have to wait two more weeks. After March 1st the fiscal cliff will be nothing more than a memory.