In a Freudian slip earlier this week, GOP Minority Whip Eric Cantor admitted that it's the Democratic Party -- not the GOP -- that represents underdogs in America. And today, via Greg Sargent, we're getting the latest evidence supporting Cantor's claim:
This morning the Republican National Committee blasted out a story from The Hill about a new nonpartisan study finding that the poor will be hit hardest if all the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire. An RNC spokesman, taking a shot at the Dems' failure to extend the tax cuts, rhetorically asked: "What excuse will the Democrats use now?"
Here's the funny thing, though. While that study does indeed find that letting all the tax cuts expire does disproportionately hurt the poor, it also finds that the plan Dems have actually proposed on the Bush tax cuts is better for the poor than the Republican one.
As Greg points out, the Republicans fail to acknowledge that the plan supported by Democrats would in fact extend tax cuts for all income earned under $250,000 -- which means everybody who earns less than $250,000 would keep their tax cuts on all their income.
In fact, even people who earn more than $250,000 would still get a tax cut on their first $250,000 of earnings -- just like everybody else. Every Democrat supports those tax cuts, but Republicans and Blue Dogs don't think they're enough. They also want the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 to be extended, effectively meaning wealthy people get two tax cuts while everybody else just gets one.
But what sets the Republicans apart is that in order to get their way, they are willing to hold all the tax cuts hostage so that nobody gets anything. Only under their all-or-nothing plan is it possible that nobody will get a tax cut, yet they are still pointing the finger across the aisle.
In the GOP argument, Democratic unwillingness to cave into their demands means Democrats have "forced" Republicans to hold the tax cuts hostage. That obviously makes no sense at all. Still, this all this would have been easier to explain if Blue Dogs hadn't idiotically stopped Democrats from holding a vote before the election. But that doesn't change the underlying story: Republican are committed to holding tax cuts for everybody hostage unless wealthy people get the (two) biggest tax cuts of all. And that's just plain wrong.