As long as I'm on the subject of taxes, #3

When the current discounted federal income tax rates were set in 2001, they were, again, avowedly temporary. I didn't buy it. I said the "temporary" part was a scam.

I said that when the time came for the rates to revert to what they had previously been, a great hue and cry would be raised about how "You want to - gasp - increase taxes! Tax and spend! Tax and spend! Higher taxes! Oh, the horror!"

Which is pretty much what's happened, save that the Dims had enough political wit this time to claim a desire to continue the current rates for almost everyone, forcing the GOPpers to come up with that "job creators" bullcrap. Even so, the game has played out pretty much as I predicted, with everyone and their brother saying how we can't "raise taxes" - even though, again, that's not what would be happening by any logical understanding of the matter.

Now that the plans to continue the lower rates but limit them to the first $250,000 (and, on the second vote, $1,000,000) of income, somehow anything below a cool quarter-million a year being "middle class," have failed, talk has returned the earlier notion of extending the lower rates on all income - but only for two years for the exospheric end of the income spectrum.

Again, I call bullshit. I call scam.

Does anyone really think that in a presidential year the Dims are going to stand up against GOPper cries about the need to "head off" the "coming tax hike" on "America's job creators?" Does anyone think that the GOPper-controlled House would not pass a bill making the lower rate permanent for the ultra-rich and then send the bill to the Senate, daring the Dums to vote against it and thus, they will crow, "killing jobs?"

In fact, do you really think that no one, neither Dum nor GOPper, has thought of the fact that if the current rate sale is allowed to expire, that could happen now? That first thing in the new Congress, the GOPper-run House could re-pass the present rates, including for the very rich, and dare the Senate to reject it, thus, they will say at every opportunity, "voting in favor of raising taxes on all hard-working Americans already overburdened by the failed liberal policies of tax-and-spend?"

In fact, that possibility seems so obvious to me that I really wonder, really truly wonder, how much of what we're seeing is really just shadow-boxing with the outcome already fixed.

I'll say it again: We are so screwed.