{"id":6989,"date":"2011-08-07T08:10:03","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T13:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=6989"},"modified":"2011-08-08T08:28:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T13:28:12","slug":"resistance-to-revenue-increase-causes-s-p-downgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2011\/08\/07\/resistance-to-revenue-increase-causes-s-p-downgrade\/","title":{"rendered":"Resistance To Revenue Increase Causes S & P Downgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the article Mainstream Media Ignores S&P Attack On Republicans<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Page 4 of the official Standard & Poors \u201cResearch Update\u201d<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I did a Google search and could find no mention of this except in a comment on an article on one newspaper web site.\u00a0 Of course, I only checked the first few of the 33,600 entries from the search S & P Downgrade “raise revenue”<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 I had hoped for a link to the actual report so I could read it myself.<\/p>\n

See if you can do any better finding this information.<\/p>\n

\n

I did a Google search on Reason US Downgrade<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 Again I only found the reason in comments on news stories.\u00a0 One of the comments cited the same article as I cited above.<\/p>\n

\n

In the article from Bloomberg News<\/em> that I read in The Boston Globe<\/em>, Treasury official faults credit rating downgrade<\/strong><\/a>, I did find the following paragraphs:<\/p>\n

S&P reduced the US rating one grade to AA+ while keeping the outlook at \u201cnegative,\u2019\u2019 saying it was less confident that Congress would end Bush-era tax cuts or tackle spending on entitlements.
\n…
\nS&P was looking for $4 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years. The deal that passed Congress Tuesday would bring $2.1 trillion to $2.4 trillion in cuts over that time.<\/p>\n

It is concerned that lawmakers and the administration might fail to make those cuts because Democrats and Republicans are divided over how to implement them. Republicans are refusing to raise taxes in any deficit-cutting deal while Democrats are fighting to protect entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

August 7, 2011, 11:03 PM.<\/p>\n

I have now read the full 8 page S & P Report<\/strong><\/a> as have millions of other investors.<\/p>\n

The original article from which I quoted left out an important sentence that makes the quote even more damaging in my opinion.\u00a0 In the quote below, I put in the missing sentence along with the original.<\/p>\n

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Putting the missing sentence together with the original extracted quote makes it clear that S & P does not believe that President Obama will be able to prevent the Republics from making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy a permanent fixture of our tax laws.\u00a0 All Congressional Budget Office analyses assume a base line scenario that the Bush tax cuts will expire.\u00a0 The CBO analysis of any proposed congressional legislation only rates what that legislation will do when compared to existing law.\u00a0 The existing law says that the Bush tax cuts will expire in their entirety.\u00a0 Even President Obama wants to keep the tax cuts for the middle class.<\/p>\n

I am not faulting the CBO for their assumptions.\u00a0 The job of the CBO is to make objective analyses without introducing any political speculations.\u00a0 So the best thing they can do is to to not second guess the political process and clearly state their assumptions.\u00a0 With the assumptions clearly stated, the reader can then make whatever different assumptions they want to make and then adjust the results as appropriate.\u00a0 This seems to be exactly what S & P did.<\/p>\n

No wonder the S & P is so upset with the prospects for our getting control of the budgeting process and appropriately adjusting the results of the\u00a0 CBO report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the article Mainstream Media Ignores S&P Attack On Republicans: Page 4 of the official Standard & Poors \u201cResearch Update\u201d … We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[165,166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-greenbergs-law-of-the-media","7":"category-stevegsposts","8":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6989"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7020,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6989\/revisions\/7020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}