The Extreme Center
Congress has launched into lame-duck tedium.
They’re grooming the freshmen and feeding ’em.
But one thing’s for certain
In a Congress this partisan —
It’s doubtful they’ll ever reach a happy medium.
Day: November 15, 2010
No Honeymoon: Public Approval of GOP Midterm Win Is Down 22 Points from Approval of Dems’ Win in 2006
Swing voters gave Pres. Obama and the Democrats in Congress less than 22 months to resolve the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the 1929 financial meltdown that took nearly a decade to resolve.
Now polling suggests they’ll give incoming GOP House Speaker John Boehner an even shorter honeymoon, if he gets one at all.
These voters demand instant gratification, and poll data suggests that Boehner and his caucus, which will include dozens of tea-bagger political neophytes and clueless amateurs, will have a very few months to put the economy right.
As has been noted here before, in the run-up to the midterms, poll after poll showed that Republicans in Congress were the least popular political entities among voters. Their disapproval ratings were consistently higher than the Democrats, sometimes by double-digit margins. And yet, at the same time they were expressing their disdain for Republicans in Washington, poll after poll showed that non-aligned voters were committed to putting them back into power.
Exit polls from Nov. 2 showed that, generally speaking, 95 percent of Democrats voted for Democrats and 95 percent of Republicans voted for Republicans. However, no-party voters tilted to the GOP by roughly a 60/40 margin.
And now that the dust is settling from Election Day, it appears that less than half the public is happy that the GOP is back in power, a significant drop from the nearly two-thirds who were happy in 2006 when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, according to a new poll from Pew Research:
GOP Tax Plan Costs $36.6 Bil More Than Dems’ – Swing Voters, You’ve Been Had
Here’s more proof that this “new” crop of Republican leaders in Washington — Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, DeMint and the rest — are the same Bush rubberstampers whose stealthy war on the middle class in the 2000s transferred more of the nation’s wealth up from the nation’s entrepreneurial class to the GOP’s corporate sponsors and their friends, the idle rich, and whose policies caused the economy to crash in September 2008, barely a month before they were turned out of Congress by the voters.
Households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011.
This year they managed to fool swing voters into believing they have changed — that they are against deficits, against spending, against big government — but as this chart clearly shows, their hidden agenda has not changed:
A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year — and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation’s millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.
New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.
Here’s a chart so simple that even a tea bagger can understand it, followed by an explainer segment on the chart from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show:
