Democrat Cory Booker wants to work with LIBERTARIAN Rand Paul

[joshcryer]

241. As do I, for the most part.

But, between you and I, I bet you thought Simpsons-Bowles was bipartisan. I didn't because the Democrats always kept a poverty exemption in there as well as closing tax loopholes. Now, it was definitely bipartisan to put Chained-CPI on the table, but from the point of view of the Democrats, that was a sacrifice they'd be willing to make to close corporate tax-loopholes and exempt millions of seniors from poverty. Was it the best thing to do? No, obviously raising the cap was the best thing to do, but that would've become a partisan issue because that's a tax raise on the top 5%.

So the Democrats feigned bi-partisanship all along when they knew that the likelihood of it happening was nil. And Obama gets to say "I came to the table." The reality is that the Democrats are playing with petulant children and they're not ignorant of that as the shutdown showed. Obama is actually accused by the right wing of being a shitty leader because he's too partisan, because the Democrats in Congress keep putting poison pills in legislation that could pass without them (C-CPI would easily pass without a poverty exemption of corporate tax loopholes closed).

Now would they have accepted it? Yes. And that is definitely worrisome. And of course I would've been against them accepting it. As gamemanship, I thought it was a good move, because it pushed the debt ceiling out until now.

Will they suggest the same thing again? Yes. And the result will be the same thing. There's simply no way seniors get exempted from poverty and that the corporate tax loopholes are closed.

Note: they also want to lower the corporate rate to 15% but the effective rate is already 12% because of all the loopholes, so if you think "oh they're lowering taxes" they're not, because closing the loopholes would make the effective rate the real rate! BTW, only big business benefits from the loopholes, not individuals or small companies. It's not worth it for individuals or small companies to hire a lawyer to save them $100 a year or to hire a tax service to go through each of their receipts line by line which itself would probably cost more than $100.

Anyway, my last word, been an entertaining OP. Spent 4 hours here, darn you, I have Walking Dead to watch!