Why are the Bush 2002 tax cuts to expire in 2009?

Did he plan it like that, to saddle his successor with a no-win situation?

IMO it is win win win win....

If it's a democrat in the White House, the President can be accused of "raising taxes" when in fact the tax cuts expire. Not to mention the Estate Tax expiring: Bush will make the accusation that a democrat in the White House will be threatening the deaths of many rich old people if the estate tax isn't made permanent. (Implying that there will be lots of unexplained deaths when the estate tax is $0.00 in 2009 and back to 23% (I think) on January 1, 2010 if the estate tax isn't eliminated before that date.)

It's also a LOT easier for the Dems to just ignore his taxes and let them expire than it would be to pass a NeW BILL increasing taxes.

rich mans scam. That's why Shrub has been hammering for congress to make his tax cuts permanent. Without that agreement, he wouldn't have had enough Dems to pass the bill.

maybe it's to avoid the lag-time between when legislation passes and when its actual effect hits the general public, which is often clear into and beyond the next Presidency. Voters often forget they are suffering from or enjoying the actual trickle-down fruits of the previous legislation and policies. We really never know why things are good or bad because it takes a few, sometimes several years for policies and legislation to affect the ordinary Joe....and nobody takes time to do their homework and trace back the effects to their source, not being economic and political historian geniuses, and the media certainly has a short memory. We just blindly assume that whomever is in office at the time is responsible for our current conditions. Maybe that's all the motivation. A successor could easily render a continuation of the tax cuts after assuming office if Americans liked it and the economy reflected a positive surge as a result...hope that happens, I could use a tax cut every single year.

I see.

:eyes:

it's taken a full seven years for Bush to trickle us down to bankruptcy. And don't count on any tax cuts in your lifetime. We'll be paying for bush's war for years and years to come. We haven't even made the down payment yet.

and that was when we had a surplus and no war.

go figure.

There were lots of editorials at the time predicting we'd be exactly where we're at; that politically it would be very difficult to let the tax reductions expire because it would be criticized as a tax increase. That being said, there are lots of reasons that the tax laws need to be overhauled again, including fixing the alternative minimum tax, increasing the minimum estate value before imposition of the estate tax, and reducing the differential between earned income and investment income (I'd prefer to eliminate the differential altogether, but that won't happen in the current political environment). And although I'd be surprised if Congress did it, I'd like to see a rollback (at least in part) of the tax cuts for the top income bracket folks and a serious effort to root out the more egregious provisions of the tax code that are simply indefensible (I'm reading David Cay Johnston's latest book "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)" and it makes me just as angry as "Perfectly Legal:The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and CheatEverybody Else."