A Party of Hypocrites.

As it turns out, the GOP aren't all that adverse to raising taxes, after all. Even the Tea Party's patron saint of American conservative governance, St. Reagan the Gipper, often raised taxes despite allaying his fellow conservatives' concerns of being swept up in the demonic liberal tax-and-spend waves. Just not on the top 1% of earners in this nation. That remains sacrosanct as far as the GOP is concerned.

Instead, it will be the middle class and working class that ends up shouldering the tax burdens of this nation.

America’s presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000. 

Their tax hike doesn’t apply to income from investments. It doesn’t apply to any wage income in excess of $106,800 a year. It’s the payroll tax that they want to raise — to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent of your paycheck, a level established for one year in December’s budget deal at Democrats’ insistence. Unlike the capital gains tax, or the low tax rates for the rich included in the Bush tax cuts, or the carried interest tax for hedge fund operators (which is just 15 percent), the payroll tax chiefly hits the middle class and the working poor.

Any bets on conservatives willing to blame Democrats based on the underlined info? It's perfect - agree to hit the middle and working classes in the wallets to preserve the sanctity of the wealthy's pocketbooks while blaming Democrats for the whole thing.

While President Obama has made clear that he supports extending the lower 4.2 percent payroll tax rate for another year, to keep the economy from contracting further, congressional Republicans have made their opposition equally clear. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. Camp complained that it would push the deficit higher. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the man who’d have us scrap Medicare, concurred. “It would simply exacerbate our debt problems,” he said on Fox News Sunday this month.

Given the prior shitfest over raising taxes (especially when it involved raising corporate and capital gains taxes), this faux concern over a lower payroll tax is just pure comedy.

Meanwhile, the Bush tax cuts remain sacrosanct, as do the idea of raising capital gains and other taxes that affect wealthy individuals and corporations. It's amazing to see the GOP talk about how Democrats exacerbate and perpetuate class warfare, yet the GOP put words into action by doing those very things. Besides, the middle and working classes should be used to eating their own bootstraps by now.