A Christmas Message To The Middle Class Taxpayer

Dear Middle-Class Taxpayer,

You’ll soon notice that your income tax rate has increased by fifty percent, from 10 to 15%.  Taxes have gone up across the board, which may well have caused you to join the ranks of the unemployed.  You might be among the millions of families hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was not adjusted for inflation, and may therefore have sucked hundreds of dollars out of your wallet.

We’re deeply sorry about this.  We tried to prevent it.  We got President Obama to the table with a very expensive extension of unemployment benefits.  He came out of the meeting with us complaining that we had “taken him hostage”... but as soon as he walked away from the microphones, the Democrats threw a bag over his head and dragged him into the back of a limousine.  Their ransom note just arrived, scrawled on an entire roll of recycled toilet paper.  We had to unroll it all the way across the floor of the Senate to read their list of demands.

The toilet paper stank of ethanol – about five billion dollars’ worth of it.  Your taxes are going up because we wouldn’t keep throwing away billions of your dollars on “bio-fuel” and other big-ticket donations to the Green religion.  The Democrats thought it was worth hiking your taxes, to demand more of your money, to spend on forcing you to buy the hybrid cars you don’t want.  Sadly, we had to pull some of our guys away from the ethanol.  They’re in detox now.  We think most of them will pull through.

Your taxes are going up because the Democrats demanded billions in additional pork-barrel spending on “infrastructure,” after they already stole a trillion dollars of your money for “stimulus” that was supposed to keep unemployment down.  “Infrastructure” means “signs on the side of the road telling you how wonderful stimulus spending is.” 

Over the last two years, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars per job to create temporary positions that vanished as soon as the stimulus money ran out, but the Democrats want more.  They even had the nerve to call pork spending “proven to work” in creating jobs, as Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon said.  He assumes you’re stupid, and don’t remember what happened the last time his party pulled billions out of your wallet and staggered off to the vote-buying bar, mumbling a promise to return with jobs .

Senate Democrats added benefits for their Hollywood friends to the bill as well.  No amount of your money is too much for them to spend on such an urgent national priority.

We had a deal in place to keep your taxes from going up, but when Senate Democrats started scribbling their wish list in the margins, we had to walk away.  You’ll hear a lot of nonsense spouted from the other side of the aisle, as they desperately try to shift blame away from themselves.  They’re always telling you the government needs to control every aspect of the economy, to protect the “little guy” from the brutal appetites of the free market… but then every huge piece of legislation that rolls out of Congress is covered with tons of little side deals and backroom payoffs.  You can barely see the original bill through all the Post-Its slapped on top.  It’s never a coherent “plan.”  It’s always the result of intense bargaining to determine which taxpayers get screwed the worst.  The Democrats blew the entire lame-duck session of Congress playing such games.  They were still at it two weeks before Christmas, after two years of failing to write a budget or set tax policy for 2011.

In an NPR interview, President Obama said, “Here's what I'm confident about - that nobody, Democrat or Republican, wants to see people's paychecks smaller on January first because Congress didn't act.”  That’s an obvious and demonstrable lie.  Obama and his party were very eager to see certain people’s paychecks get smaller.  Because of their political games, and the inexcusable failure of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to do their jobs throughout the 111^th Congress, now everyone’s check is smaller.