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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me. It's a bit linkbaity, yes. The payroll tax holiday was a stimulus measure that was never meant to be permanent, yes. We should not compound the long term issues with social security by chronically underfunding it, yes.

It's a hike and one I'm perfectly happy to live with. As a commenter at metafilter put it:

Well, it's that or more ice floes to put the old folk on, and the ice industry isn't making any production gains either.

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>The bottom line is taxes are going up from what people paid two weeks ago. Calling that a hike is not disingenuous to me.

I'm not so sure. If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month. Maybe it's just me, but hike has a very specific connotation that isn't appropriate here.

There's a subtle difference between a companies prices and taxes. If I only bought from one store every week and for 10 years I paid $1 for a loaf of bread and one day the bread cost $2 I would still feel justified in calling that a 100% price hike regardless of whether they had announced that the $1 price was temporary 10 years ago. I'll admit there's some wiggle room to argue price hike or not but I don't feel as if I'm the one jumping through all the hoops to make my case.

Full disclosure: I normally pay around $4 for a loaf of bread.

> If a company has a huge sale for 1 month and everything is temporarily 50% off, we don't call it a 100% "price hike" the next month.

No, but if they had that "sale" for over 10 years, rather than one month, then you might call it a price increase.

You do realize the payroll tax cut only lasted 2 years, right? Not only that, but I'm fairly certain it was enacted partly to counteract the recession, which by definition should only be temporary.

In the context of historically low taxes (the top rate used to be 94% and is now 35%), I think the sale analogy is much more apt.

Of course it is. "50% off this month only" is exactly the same, in money terms, as "we intend to raise price of it 100% next month". Of course, the former sounds much better, which is why you never see the latter, even though it is exactly the same thing. People have very hard time applying logic to money, for some reason.

The Bush era tax cuts were also never meant to be permanent. That is why calling it a tax hike is disingenuous at best.

So tax hike is not a tax hike if you plan it upfront? So if your employer says to you "you're getting a raise of $1000 for this year, but only for one year" it is not the same as getting a raise of $1000 and then getting a pay cut of $1000 next year? And the difference is... what exactly? That it was known upfront? How it makes anything different?

>So if your employer says to you "you're getting a raise of $1000 for this year, but only for one year"

That's called a bonus and there's quite a difference. There's also a difference between a one year contract and getting laid off unexpectedly after one year.

You really don't get the practical difference?

Bonus is one-time and usually contingent, salary raise is increasing each paycheck and unconditional. But you can, of course, have a bonus which is unconditional, in which case it's just a pay raise.

>>>> There's also a difference between a one year contract and getting laid off unexpectedly after one year.

There is, but not in money. You could, for example, look in advance for the next gig if you knew. Since there's no way to prepare in advance for higher taxes that would make any difference (not for salarymen - for investors, they already did - tons of companies paid early dividends in 2012, sometimes borrowing to finance it), so it makes no practical difference at all.

The reason some people don't want to call it a hike is that the passing of the law didn't cause it, it was a sunset baked into the old law.

Arguing over labels is a red herring. Is it a hike? Maybe. Who cares? Many reasonable people might say it's a hike, so don't hide from that or try and split hairs. At the end of the day it's the right thing to do... so do it, even if it's a hike.

I think the left has taken this approach in America, and let the right repeatedly pick the worst labels for EVERYTHING from the left's perspective.

It's called framing.

There's framing debates and there's Bill Clinton arguing about the meaning of the word 'is'. Sometimes you got to know when you're doing the former and when you're tilting at windmills. I also think the right's perceived advantage here is heavily overstated.

The Bill Clinton "is" thing is a bit like the hot coffee lawsuit: When you look at the details, it's quite a bit less silly then the news made it seem

The Paula Jones lawyers deposed Clinton earlier with a ridiculous definition of sexual relations, the judged chopped it down way too far, and Clinton didn't answer one more bit then he had to because they kept leaking shit, and no one answers more than they have to in a deposition.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-105hdoc311/pdf/GPO-CDO... for the grand jury testimony about all this. Look at page 454 by searching to read the start of it.

All that said, yes, there is a point where definition of a word doesn't really matter. So yes, I agree with you, George Bush hiked the taxes on Jan 1 2013 on the upper class due to a expiration clause on a tax bill, and the Republicans opted not to renew the payroll tax holiday Obama got in exchange for a 2 year extention of the Bush Tax Cuts. They did not agree to extend these cuts when he did not agree to continued extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the highest wage income earners.

I understand and am sympathetic to Clinton but in the eyes of the public he lost and looked silly.

There's two battles progressives (and I am one) can fight here and getting sidetracked into the fight over framing this as a hike or not is not a battle they are going to win. OTOH while there was bipartisan support for letting the payroll tax holiday expire, Obama had proposed extending it for another year and bargained it away to Republicans. So if the GOP wants to call it a hike let them and remind everyone that they wanted this hike more than the Democrats did. That's a battle that's far more winnable.

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