Republicans: "Tax Cuts Are The Answer. No, No, Not Those Tax Cuts, These Tax Cuts!"

Tonight, with the stage all to themselves, the Republican Presidential candidates will "debate", i.e. they'll try like hell to avoid saying anything stupid. Toward that end, Mitt Romney will try to appear like a CEO, instead of the spineless tool of the corporate/financial elite that he actually is. Rick Perry will try not to seem like the mean, nasty, bigoted prick he actually is. And Mad Michele Bachmann will struggle to keep her inner lunatic under wraps. And of course they'll all be strongly in favor of all sorts of tax cuts. Or will they?

Tomorrow night, President Obama will make his big speech on the economy to a joint session of Congress. He'll propose massive investment to build, maintain and repair our infrastructure. (Good! We need it.) His other big idea will be to continue the temporary payroll tax cut for employees for another year, and to give employers a matching cut. (This is where the cheese starts to get a little more binding!)

"Payroll tax" is a euphemism for Social Security/FICA tax. For years, the contribution rate was 6.2% from employees and 6.2% from employers. But last year, Obama wanted to provide an extension of federal unemployment benefits to the long-term jobless. House Republicans gave it to him, but only after extorting a temporary 2-point cut in the employee rate, taking it down to 4.2%. It's set to return to 6.2% in January.

Republicans have forever bitched and moaned about Social Security -- they want to kill it, privatize it, tell us it's broke, and complain about that horrible "payroll tax" that sends American jobs to Bangladesh. Robbie Portman, for example, made reducing/eliminating payroll taxes the focus of his campaign. So when Obama reluctantly agreed to 4.2%, the Republicans howled with glee and proudly displayed the scalp on their tepee wall.

So tomorrow Obama will tell us he now wants to continue the 4.2% employee rate for another year, and what the hell, while we're at it, let's drop the employer's rate to 4.2% as well. That'd be mo' money, mo' money, mo' money in everyone's pocket! And a page torn straight out of the Republican playbook. The R's ought to love it, yes?

But, strangely, no. The GOP honchos now say they are opposed to cutting the payroll tax unless the revenue loss is offset with spending cuts. How's that for through-the-looking-glass weird? Republicans concerned with revenue loss resulting from a tax cut!

Where was this concern when the costly Bush tax cuts for millionaires were due to expire? Where was the insistence then about covering those costs/lost revenues with spending cuts?

It was nowhere. Because the GOP really doesn't care about small stuff like that. What they care about is power and control. They lack principles and integrity but not ambition. They want the White House and both Houses of Congress and are willing to say, do, and spend anything to get them.