Writing of the Republican party’s sudden dislike of the payroll tax cut currently in effect but due to expire in January, Harold Myerson of the WaPo slams the stance the WSJ editorial pages have taken:
The payroll tax cut, which the Journal dismisses so contemptuously, benefits every employed American, while the tax cuts the paper champions — on capital gains and millionaires’ income — accrue to a far smaller group. Immediate? Unlike taxes paid annually or quarterly, the payroll tax is drawn from each paycheck from the moment the law takes effect. Permanent? The payroll tax is the tax that funds Social Security, so reducing it really can’t be a permanent policy. But the impermanence of the Bush tax cuts, which had been set to expire this year but were extended, presented no obstacle to the Journal’s fervent support for them.
He concludes:
Republicans like to complain that Democrats practice “class warfare” and “the politics of division,” as House GOP leader Eric Cantor argued on this page Monday. What the Republicans’ position on the payroll tax makes high-definitionally clear is their own class warfare on working- and middle-class Americans. Their double standard couldn’t be more obvious: Tax cuts for the wealthy are sacrosanct; tax cuts for everyone else don’t really matter. Norquist, Cantor, Ryan, Camp, the Journal editorialists and the whole Republican crew give hypocrisy a bad name.
What prompted this burst of truth-speaking is the Republican party’s opposition to extending the payroll tax break for another year, as President Obama has advocated.
Rarely has the Republican party’s “coddle the rich, soak the poor” attitude been so starkly shown.
Sadly I’ve always known that the money taken out of my paycheck was money I’d never see when it came time that I’d need Social Security. My only consolation has been that those thousands will at least be used in the system that my parents can use.
I can’t understand why Repubs can say that about Democrats when at the same time they go out of their way to protect the rich, as they have many decades. Which is why, consistently, most business owners tend to be Repubs simply because they know that they’ll be on the side of industry. I don’t hate them for that, but it seems completely ridiculous to try to pretend they’re for the common man. At the same time as they try to curtail funding for primary and college education from multiple fronts. And then try and pretend that the founding fathers weren’t for education.