LETTER: Fiscal cliff dealings show SD as ‘backwater’

Talk about it

To the Editor:

The Daily Republic’s account of the South Dakota congressional delegation’s common support of the “fiscal cliff” bill shows how much our state is a political backwater in the nation that re-elected President Obama.

Obviously embarrassed by the fact that she, a Republican, voted for the bill, Kristi Noem covered it by attacking the president, claiming that she voted for it, because “it protected 99 percent of South Dakotans from President Obama reaching into their pockets and taking more of their hard-earned money to subsidize his continued deficit spending.” “I won’t stand by and allow this president to bring more uncertainty into the country by preventing farm families from passing on their family businesses, and hard-working moms and dads from being able to put food on their tables.”

Reading this, I was reminded of the many lies that Mitt Romney told during his failed campaign. Only the stupid and uninformed could buy this as a reason to vote for a bill that President Obama fought hard to bring a remnant of Republicans, including Noem and John Thune, to join in approving it. Both Sens. Tim Johnson and Thune stated the important truth that the bill made the Bush tax cuts permanent so they won’t have to be renegotiated every year.

What is left out of this account is the important fact that this bill made permanent the tax breaks that were first passed under President George W. Bush in two changes to the tax code in 2001 and 2003, which had a sunset provision to revert to the higher tax rate at the end of 2010. This means that the tax code set by Republican President Bush has been re-affirmed by Democratic President Obama, creating important continuity in the tax code law, and so removing the threat of the Tea Party radical anarchists, who would have brought chaos to poor and middle class Americans and to the economy at large by driving us over the fiscal cliff.

Tags: opinion, updates, letters, politics