And So It Goes

After all the fighting, the tax deal passed pretty easily.  It passed by majorities of both parties in both chambers of Congress.  Makes you wonder what all the fuss was about.  I consider it a political win for the President, though he was one of the people complaining about how awful the deal was. Whether or not it's good for the country, I can't say.  I generally thinks it good when we don't get tax hikes, but even if that's true at present, there's a lot of other unpleasant stuff in the bill.

If it hadn't passed, when people started getting smaller paychecks, there would have been hell to pay for politicians. I think that's the main reason the bill was unstoppable.  Now, the most noticeable change will be the one-year payroll tax cut.  (I thought Social Security was a separate lockbox thing where you paid your own way.)  Someone who earns $50,000 a year will get to keep approximately a thousand bucks more of it in 2011.  Let me suggest we all plow this bounty back into the economy by buying lottery tickets every Friday.

So now Congress is freed up to do whatever it can manage in its final gasps.  Which won't be much, since the 42 Republicans in the Senate seem ready to block any major pork.  So the two big items that everyone's talking about are repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, and passing the DREAM Act, which will give many immigrants here illegally a path to citizenship.  If the Dems can't get these items through this Congress, good luck for the next two years.

Mickey Kaus, who has a lot of trouble with illegal immigration, has been freaking out.  For months he's been warning that DREAM really does have a chance, though insiders have been claiming it's all for show--Dems demonstrating to their Latino base which party will do their bidding.  Though immigration issues don't always split right-left, the DREAM vote strikes me as one of those things that's sold as a principled stand, but is pure self-interest.  To put it another way, if Latinos came here illegally and, when made citizens, voted Republican, Dems would denounce any path to citizenship as pure evil while Republicans would be falling over themselves to grant blanket amnesty.