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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Howard Dean on tax strawman: 'A Short-Term Washington Fix' Filled With Easy Promises

Sam Stein
stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting


"This is a short-term Washington fix," former DNC header Howard Dean declared on CBS's "Face the Nation."

It does nothing about this biggest long-term threat to America, which is the deficit. I don't hear Republicans or Democrats talking about the deficit. There is no pain in this agreement. This is the easy way out for everybody, much as everybody is complaining, hooting and hollering, this is an inside-the-beltway fuss and somebody needs to do something about the long-term problems to this country. It is not in this bill.

The thing that bothers me about it is we have yet to deal with the biggest problem that is facing this country, which is the size of the deficit, and nobody is doing anything about it," the former Vermont Governor added later. "It is easy to promise everybody tax cuts all the time. You have got to make some cuts if you are going to do that.

On "Meet the Press," the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, was pressed on precisely on these same arguments.

You cannot reduce the deficit if the economy is not growing, period. We should not be conflating medium-run deficit reduction with short-run getting out of recession and getting our economy growing.

Dean criticized  was a provision in the "framework" that provides a one-year, two-percent payroll tax holiday that, critics say, could end up siphoning money from the Social Security Trust Fund.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/12/howard-dean-tax-deal_n_795501.html

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