How President Obama Orchestrated John Boehner's $40 Surrender Starting A Year Ago

[Born_A_Truman]

The People's View Posted by Deaniac83

The President has just signed a temporary extension of the payroll tax cut, after John Boehner and the House Republicans caved under tremendous pressure from the American people.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. Barack Obama is the most brilliant political strategist of our time - hell he's one of the most brilliant of any time. When the Republican Teabaggers in the House thought they could raise taxes on working Americans in order to protect giveaways to multinationals and the ultra rich, someone in Washington wasn't ready to let it go. President Obama wasn't ready to go. The payroll tax cut - the first tax cut in recent memory for the working poor - was due to expire at the end of this year, and the Republicans wanted to end it. Yes, they will tell you that they wanted to keep it in place, but make no mistake about their real intent: ending it by putting in poison pills.

When the Senate passed a deal last week - consisting of a temporary extension of the tax cut for two months, as well as an extension of unemployment benefits and a Medicare payment fix for providers, Teahadists thought that they hadn't extracted anything from the White House, and John Boehner, ever the very-bad-at-his-job Speaker of the House, went out there to try to please them. So the President, whose only concern has been to prevent a tax hike on working people next year that would stifle economic growth, yanked at those teabags that John Boehner was holding out.

$40. That's the amount of the payroll tax cut on each paycheck (assuming the paycheck is every two weeks) for the average family or individual making $50,000 a year. The GOP is so out of touch with the struggles of everyday Americans - one out of two of whom now live at or near poverty - that they figured that 40 bucks every two weeks means nothing - just as it wouldn't to their super rich friends. But Barack Obama, who's been poor and spent his building years being a community organizer knew better. He asked Americans directly, what does $40 mean to you? And hard-working, tax-paying, red-blooded Americans flooded the Internet and the airwaves.

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Read the entire excellent post (as always) by Deniac83 at the link.

[jaxx]

This is a really good article.

[Brainwreck]

President Obama never disappoints me. He is brilliant, and a special gift this holiday season. I shall send him my best wishes, and they also go to all the 'Democrats for Progress' stopping in this evening.

[janedrake]

Loved the information in that piece. Great read.