CalvinBall wrote:Who wins on the payrolls tax thing?

JUburton wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:Who wins on the payrolls tax thing?

I don't think either party particularly liked it. I'm glad we had it the past few years, but I guess we're basically back to the norm on it.

CalvinBall wrote:

JUburton wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:Who wins on the payrolls tax thing?

I don't think either party particularly liked it. I'm glad we had it the past few years, but I guess we're basically back to the norm on it.

NPR said dems would have liked to have kept it but it was not a fight they were going to win against the Rs. so they just gave in.

pacino wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

JUburton wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:Who wins on the payrolls tax thing?

I don't think either party particularly liked it. I'm glad we had it the past few years, but I guess we're basically back to the norm on it.

NPR said dems would have liked to have kept it but it was not a fight they were going to win against the Rs. so they just gave in.

it's a good thing to 'lose', since funding SS is always a good thing.

this was a democratic TROUNCING. dang, biden.

CalvinBall wrote:Boehner, what a pro!!

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/t ... z2GpEj8pUX

In a phone call Dec. 21, Boehner told Obama that his game plan all along was to pass the bill setting the $1 million threshold, send it to the Senate to drop it down to $500,000 or so, and ship it back to the House for approval.

Obama, perplexed by the secret strategy, asked Boehner whether he had shared it with Reid or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), suggesting that they might have helped him. Boehner said he had not.

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://www.nextnewdeal.net/paying-taxes-your-boss-another-step-toward-21st-century-feudalism

CalvinBall wrote:This guy

@GroverNorquist: The Bush tax cuts lapsed at midnight last night. Every R voting for Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge.

TenuredVulture wrote:A thought occurred to me this morning--did Boehner really win this thing by basically showing everyone how impotent the Tea Party Republicans really are?

To be fair, these are just anecdotes. You could argue that this was just an exception to Democratic intransigence. But you'd be wrong. Over at the Voteview blog, political scientists Christopher Hare, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal put data behind the contention that the GOP is responsible for the intense polarization of Congress:

[W]e find that contemporary polarization is not only real — the ideological distance between the parties has grown dramatically since the 1970s — but also that it is asymmetric — congressional Republicans have moved farther away from the center than Democrats during this period. In two figures below, we plot the mean first dimension DW-NOMINATE scores of the two parties in the House and Senate from 1879 to the present. Since the mid–1970s, Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.

And the Democratic shift to the left has less to do with the development of more liberal positions, and everything to do with the disappearance of conservative Southern Democrats. When you account for that, “the northern Democrats of the 1970s are ideologically indistinguishable from their present-day counterparts.”