I'm not wild about this payroll tax holiday for the same reasons Sen. Bernie Sanders is not, which is my concern that it could undermine funding the Social Security trust fund. Personally, I'd rather see them permanently lower the rate and lift the cap, or do something to make it a less regressive tax but also ensure the trust fund remains solvent. That said, this latest debate out of Washington on whether to extend the payroll tax holiday is showing Republicans for what they are when it comes to their hypocrisy on tax cuts.
They only like them when they benefit the wealthiest 1 percent. If it's a tax break for the working class, well, that's a bad thing. On this Wednesday's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough was exhibit one with the kind of double-speak we've seen coming from Republicans when it comes to tax cuts and job creation.
As Media Matters noted, here's why Scarborough's arguments that the payroll tax cut would do nothing to create jobs, but the Keystone pipeline project that Republicans inserted into this latest bill as a poison pill they voted on in the House, would create jobs, is exactly backwards.
Right-wing media figures are attacking President Obama for claiming that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than the Keystone XL pipeline. In fact, economists say that unemployment benefits and payroll tax cuts will put money in people's pockets and therefore lead to job creation and economic growth, while the pipeline would create at most a few thousand temporary jobs and could actually destroy more jobs than it creates. Read on...
Lots more there in their post, so go read the rest. Scarborough got worse with yelling over Brzezinski as the show went on. There are days when I manage to catch some of Morning Joe when I think she would have the right to go to their HR department at MSNBC and complain about a hostile work environment just for having to sit next to Scarborough when he's having his days where he thinks whoever yells the loudest wins the argument. This Wednesday's show was one of them and this clip wasn't the worst of it by far.
