Clyburn: We Don't Really Need to Extend Bush Tax Cuts During Lame Duck

The assistant minority leader, or is it the assistant TO the minority leader, of the US House has recently stated his doubts about whether the Bush tax cuts are "essential" or not:

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the new No. 3 leader of House Democrats in the 112th Congress, said it's not "essential" for Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts because if all income taxes go up as scheduled on January 1, "you've got a big deficit reduction taking place, which is also a good thing."

Clyburn is the first Democratic leader to suggest any benefit from a failure to extend the Bush-era tax cuts. The White House and every Democratic leader to date has described extension of the middle-class portion of the Bush tax cuts as a top economic and political priority.

He's missing the forest for the trees. If they fail to extend the tax cuts, there will be much uncertainty in the market because ALL Americans will be uncertain about what their budget will be and how much money they will have during this upcoming year. So, they will hold onto their money and not buy/invest until they are sure what their taxes will be. This won't be a small raise in our taxes. It'll be significant enough that people will have to make huge changes to their financial plans either way it goes. We need to get this over with, so they can go ahead and plan for next year.

Also, his assertion that the increased taxes will help with the deficit is untrue, if you consider what will likely happen at the beginning of the 112th Congress. As Paul Ryan stated last night, if the cuts are not passed during the lame duck, it will likely be passed at the beginning of next year, when the Republicans will get a huge majority in the House, and if it is passed, it will most likely be made retroactive to the beginning of 2011. So, there will be no benefit on that end at all. The Democrats would have put America through alot of anxiety and uncertainty for nothing.

Boehner: We Need to Raise the Retirement Age to 70 & Other Things That'll Make Social Security Solvent| Update: Clyburn, Pelosi Twist Themselves Into Human Pretzel Rewriting Boehner's Statement

Yesterday, the House Minority Leader, John Boehner, said that we should be more like the French and raise our retirement age to 70, the point when one would be eligible for Social Security benefits:

A Republican-held Congress might look to raise the retirement age to 70, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) suggested Monday.

Boehner, the top Republican lawmaker in the House, said raising the retirement age by five years, indexing benefits to the rate of inflation and means-testing benefits would make the massive entitlement program more solvent.

We're all living a lot longer than anyone ever expected, Boehner said in a meeting with the editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. And I think that raising the retirement age — going out 20 years, so you're not affecting anyone close to retirement — and eventually getting the retirement age to 70 is a step that needs to be taken.

This makes perfect sense. With people living longer than we did when Social Security was started, it seems only logical that more money would have to be doled out for longer periods of time than the program was initially designed to would cause solvency problems. Also, with medical advancements, people are living better than they did and could work longer than previous generations could. That's only one of his ideas:

But Boehner also floated several other reforms to Social Security, paired with raising the retirement age, to make it more solvent. Boehner said benefits should be tied to increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) instead of wage inflation, and he suggested reducing or eliminating benefits to Americans with a substantial non-Social Security income while retired.

We just need to be honest with people, he said. I'm not suggesting it's going to be easy, but I think if we did those three things, you'd pretty well solve the problem.

Now, we all knew that the Democrats were going to jump on this like junkyard dogs on a steak bone. However, I expected some sort of "Why does the GOP hate old people?" type of talking points, but no, they threw a swerve on me with this one:

Democrats are slamming House Minority Leader John Boehner for reportedly saying the Social Security retirement age should be raised to pay for the Afghanistan war -- though Boehner's office vehemently denies he made that connection.....

"The House Republican Leader John Boehner and his GOP colleagues want to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 and cut benefits in order to pay for George Bush's war and their failed policies of the past," House Democratic Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a written statement. "Democrats will not stand for this."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office put out a "fact sheet" accusing Boehner of wanting to "slash" Social Security not to stabilize the program, but to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan - though Iraq was not mentioned anywhere in the Tribune-Review article. 

I can't find anywhere in Boehner's comments regarding his idea of raising the retirement age that has anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. In other words, they're lying.