Three Republicans break ranks on Bush tax cuts

WHAT IN THE WORLD is going on here? It's not often that Republicans break ranks from their talking points oracles. But it is happening, folks, in the debate over exending the Bush tax cuts that have already siphoned more than $2.5 trillion (that's with a "tr") from the treasury with 52 pct. of the benefits going to the richest 5 pct. of our hard-working board room taxpayers.

Let's begin with Alan Greenspan, the craggy gravel-voiced former Fed chairman who told the Meet the Press audience that extending the cuts would be, well.. disastrous. Coming from a power peddler who once defended that Bush giveaway, that would border on heresy if not a common political flip flop. In short, Greenspan now insists the deficit cannot take a major hit like that.

Then there is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, the Virginia Rrepublican just half a shadow behind John Boehner, who said he always likes the sound of tax cuts, but admitted that "Certainly you're a going to dig the hole deeper" into the deficit.

Now comes David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, who wrote in the New York Times:"If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing." So there!

On the other hand, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the senate minority leader, went into denial with second-grade arithmetic even before the other guys showed up. "There's no evidence whatsoever " he soared, " that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy."

With that lofty misstatement, maybe we can get him to give us the solution to pi.

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