GOP Trades Principle For Politics With Tax Deal

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Tax Deal: Republicans are being lauded for their political savvy in agreeing to extend the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for another year without paying for it. Well, it may be good politics, but it's bad on principle.

If there's one thing pundits on the left and the right agree on, it's that Republicans in Congress were politically clever to deny President Obama two issues he wanted to use against the GOP: extending the two-percentage point payroll tax cut and extra jobless benefits through the end of this year.

No doubt, they're right. After all, as we've heard repeated for decades, politics is the "art of compromise."

Without action by Congress, the payroll tax cut would have expired at the end of February. Republicans knew they would be tarred by the Democrats and the mainstream media — is there really any difference? — for "raising taxes" on 160 million Americans when it did.

So instead of opposing it, as they did last year, the GOP went along with Democrats to extend it.

"The payroll tax cut is political candy," Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. correctly observed Wednesday. "Once you hand it out, it's hard to take it back."

The big problem with this is that it adds $100 billion to the deficit and won't be offset by cuts elsewhere. It moves up the bankruptcy of the Social Security system, while adding another $100 billion to our debt — all for a benefit worth less than $20 a week to average workers.