Tax

One of the many dividends of the Bush years was his well known tax cut. The result of the tax cut is our massive debt. You can't cut income, increase spending, and expect it all to work out, but Bush and the GOP did that.

So Obama is over a rock and a hard place. The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to end in December. The economy is fragile as we know, and so what to do. Increasing taxes in the midst of a recession is not a good idea, yet maintaining the cuts will drive up the deficit and force the US to borrow from China and such.

The political implications are obvious and worn out. The Democrats become the big tax and spenders, and this of course relies on the American public's overall stupidity and absolute memory failure.

I applaud Obama's move to bring it to the GOP yesterday. It was great, present the facts and tell it like it is. This has to happen and Obama needs to demonstrate in clear terms right in front of these GOPers what is coming and why.

McClatchy: Extending tax cuts or letting them expire could cost Obama

With his budget proposal Monday, Obama will urge Congress to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts for those who make less than $250,000 a year and to end those cuts for everyone who makes more than that, as he promised in his campaign.

Extending those cuts — along with another fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax to make sure those people don't get socked with a tax increase — would add as much as $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years...

Keeping all of the Bush tax cuts without offsetting spending cuts would add $4.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years...