…is a $3 trillion dollar problem. Next year, the new Republican majority in the U.S. House will have to face one heck of a fork in the road.
Will they extend the Bush Tax Cuts and keep $3 trillion dollars in the economy?
Or will they allow them to expire, and use the money to close the federal deficit?
Should the House GOP vote to extend the Bush Tax Cuts, they will have to do one of two things almost immediately: (1) raise the debt ceiling, or (2) threaten a showdown with the Senate Democrats and President Obama over spending.
The last time House Republicans called the bluff of a president and allowed a shutdown of the federal government, it was the GOP who ended up on the worse end of the argument. It effectively ended the “Revolution of ’94” and allowed for triangulation to create its own narrative… and ultimately re-elected Bill Clinton to a second term.
Politics is the art of the possible. If we extend the tax cuts, do Republican activists have the stomach to fight while their neighbors in Northern Virginia are out of work? When they stop shopping and small businesses no longer benefit from the massive machinery of government bleeding the rest of America dry?
Will the House GOP cut spending? Or will they whip out the very same national credit card we presumably fought to ensure Obama and the Democrats would not rack up?
I know what we’d like to see… but you and I both know what’s coming. And that, my friends, is sad.
