DeFazio goes on MSNBC, says 'Fuck the fiscal cliff!' Grand Bargain Express wobbles, heads explode!

[ProSense]

93. No silly, they

opposed tax cuts for the middle class.

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President Obama’s tax cuts versus President Bush’s tax cuts

President Bush enacted his tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and over their 10-year lifespan, they reduced tax revenues by around $2.4 trillion, with $474 billion of that coming in the first four years. The first-term impact of those tax cuts is equivalent to about $574 billion in today’s dollars, or about 1.1 percent of gross domestic product.

President Obama has also signed two major pieces of tax-cutting legislation into law. The first, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, included a variety of tax cuts that benefited nearly every single American household. ARRA contained the Making Work Pay tax credit that directly reduced a family’s income tax bill by up to $800, which, overall, reduced tax revenue by about $116 billion. It included expansions of the child, earned income, American Opportunity, and first-time homebuyer tax credits. ARRA patched up the alternative minimum tax, providing $70 billion in tax cuts, and cut a wide array of business taxes, together totaling another $60 billion.

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First, President Obama’s tax cuts are much more targeted at the middle class. The Bush tax cuts were heavily skewed toward the wealthy with more than half of the entire benefit going only to the richest 20 percent. President Obama’s tax cuts, on the other hand, are distributed more evenly. Eighty-five percent of the benefits of the Making Work Pay tax credit, for example, went to the bottom 80 percent of households, and because the very wealthy don’t pay payroll taxes on all of their income, the payroll tax cut, too, benefits the middle class much more than the Bush tax cuts did.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/obama_bush_taxes.html

Food Stamps Reduced The Poverty Rate By Nearly 8 Percent In 2009, As GOP Tries To Gut The Program

By Travis Waldron

Congressional Republicans have targeted the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, for budget cuts, and have attempted to paint it as a program rife with fraud and abuse that is on an unsustainable path. While their argument ignores a host of facts, including that food stamp fraud is at an all-time low, it also ignores the economic benefits that the program brings to millions of low-income families.

According to a new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food stamps substantially reduced the poverty rate in 2009, the last year data is available, the New York Times reports:

The food stamp program…reduced the poverty rate by nearly 8 percent in 2009, the most recent year included in the study, a significant impact for a social program whose effects often go unnoticed by policy makers. [...]

The study, which examined nine years of data, tried to measure the program’s effects on people whose incomes remained below the poverty threshold. The program lifted the average poor person’s income up about six percent closer to the line over the length of the study, making poverty less severe. When the benefits were included in the income of families with children, the result was that children below the threshold moved about 11 percent closer to the line.

The USDA study aligns closely with a similar one released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found that food stamps reduced the number of Americans living in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to just over 800,000. SNAP’s effects on children are even bigger — the program cut the number living in extreme poverty by half, according to CBPP.

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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/04/10/461337/food-stamps-reduce-poverty/

The benefits increases via the stimulus expire next year.

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The Recovery Act’s increase in SNAP benefits has eased hardship and boosted the economy. SNAP has not only expanded dramatically to meet rising need during the recession, but has also delivered more than $26 billion (between April 2009 and September 2011) in additional SNAP benefits under the Recovery Act. The Recovery Act provided a temporary, 13.6 percent boost in the maximum SNAP benefit beginning in federal fiscal year 2009. Congress enacted this provision as a fast and effective economic stimulus measure to help push against the rising tide of hardship for low-income Americans. The increase is phasing down and is scheduled to end entirely on October 31, 2013.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3239

DeFazio voted against that.

Hilarious, huh?