Amazing

House Dems demand end of tax deal for debt-ceiling hike

A group of House Democrats is calling for any deal to raise the debt ceiling to bring about the end of the Bush tax rates for the wealthy.

The lawmakers, led by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), also say that, following last week’s weak job report, they are concerned that certain decreases in federal spending could hurt the economy’s recovery.

They added that allowing the Bush tax rates for the wealthiest to expire at the end of next year would by itself “stop the growth of the deficit over the next decade.”

Ed Morrissey:

Not only do Blumenauer and his cohorts demonstrate their political irrelevance, they’re also displaying astonishingly bad math skills as well. The projected revenue from hiking the top tax rate to its pre-Bush rate, even using static tax analysis, is around $700 billion over a decade. A $700 billion infusion would not eliminate the “growth of the deficit” over a decade, not at current rates of spending and growth in entitlement spending projected over that period; in fact, it wouldn’t even cut this year’s deficit in half.

Yes, they said there'd be no math. But these people lack even the most general, common sense conception of the situation; they fail to grasp it by orders of magnitude. The question is how dim bulbs like Blumenauer, et al., get elected in the first place. Their voters must be just as dumb as they are. No wonder the country's in the shape it's in.

As a commenter points out, $700 billion is $70 billion per year over 10 years. The annual deficit is running at about $1.4 trillion, so $70 billion is only 5%, a trivial amount. I have long suspected that these fools, Obama included, are essentially innumerate; they simply have no conception of large numbers. Million, billion, trillion, whatever. It's like somebody who can only count the fingers on one hand, so numbers larger than 5 are beyond his comprehension and all vaguely the same.

Byron