Holding out for the 2% is ridiculous, and I agree with Bill Kristol on this. Half of them voted for Obama anyway, and its such a small voting bloc it does not impact elections. The ones that don’t want their taxes raised are going to donate to Democrats next time rather than Republicans? Sure they will.

But alas, the cliff will not happen, and everyone on the right will realize that instead of $1.2T in cuts it is something less. And they will go back to complaining about Democrats when the solution (as you say, the start of the solution) had been already approved by both sides, and then rejected.

I think this is exactly right – Obama the other day hinted he’d come back & do tax cuts later – the very WORST thing that could happen would be that Repubs get blamed for everyone’s taxes going up, then Obama rides in heroically on his white horse & proposes the exact same cuts (except for the top 2%) we already had, and suddenly becomes the savior of the lower & middle classes. This is all just political theater anyway – as the article said (& others have said here), none of this even begins to address the huge problem of deficits…

I agree, sequestration should be viewed as a good first step and it is likely the best deal Republicans can get. If the Republicans were smart they would pass a permanent extention for the bottom 4 brackets to keep as much of the Bush tax cuts as possible because when they are forced to vote for them later, they will be called the Obama tax cuts for the poor and middle class.

Over time, it would also show how raising taxes on the rich wont solve our spending problem.

These are no longer Democrats, they are now Socialists at the minimum.

I had two customers in my place the other day, politics comes up and one proudly says to me

“Oh, I am a Socialist”

the other one says

“yeah, Im also a Socialist”.

I said “dope number one meet dope number two”.

I do not understand why the Republicans simply do not take the cliff, and then agree with Democrats to restoring the Bush cuts for 98% of the country, and declare victory. Why? They will have achieved the Bush tax cuts for 98% of the country (and just think of that, Democrats agreeing to tax rates that Bush wanted for 98% of the country. You lost on 2%? Too bad, that’s democracy), and the largest spending cuts that, quite honestly, are even possible in this economy. $1.2 Trillion. That number will not get any bigger right now. Yes, it has defense cuts, but those cuts will still mean this country spends as much on the military as the next 15 countries combined.

Both the top 2% of wage earners, and the military, will survive quite nicely, thank you very much. If you think that would be a victory for Democrats, you don’t remember what Democrats at one time stood for.

The fiscal cliff is not controlling short term and long term spending but the Democrats and their media have successfully made this about preventing cuts and raising taxes on the rich and Obama is happy to take money from the poor and middle class if he can blame it on someone else.

Absent from the discussion is the 3.9% tax increase on millionaires and billionaires making $250k a year from Obamacare, nearly equal to the tax rate reduction enacted by Bush.