Furthering their ongoing effort to push the idea that only Republicans can support tax cuts, Fox & Friends took to the airwaves today to attack Obama's supposed “re-branding” of the proposal to extend many of the Bush tax cuts.

Discussing efforts on the “left” to “re-brand” the extention of the Bush-era tax cuts as the Obama middle class tax cuts, Doocy complained: “Democrats aren't proposing new tax breaks, they just want to take credit from the current ones from George Bush”:

Later, Doocy added a little absurdity into an already pretty absurd conversation by setting up a “taste-test” between a Coke can labeled “Bush tax cuts” and a Coke can labeled “Obama tax cuts” to show that they're “surprisingly identical”:



Here's the thing though, what Congress is proposing are not the Bush tax cuts, for one very simple reason: The Bush tax cuts expire. Bush, and a Republican led Congress chose to have the Bush tax cuts “sunset” on the last day of 2010, largely because Republicans neglected to propose any way to pay for the hugely expensive cuts, and letting them expire after nine years mitigated the enormous price-tag that accompanied these cuts (because price estimates are calculated over a 10-year period).

What Congress is proposing now, is to to extend the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts for everyone making less than $200,000 a year for another 10 years. This would most certainly be a new cut, and while they too come with an enormous price tag, we save $700 billion dollars by not including cuts for those very top earners. Plus, tax cuts for those top earners earn us the least stimulus for our money. So they don't “taste” identical, after all.

Furthermore, this is hardly the first time the Obama administration has signed a tax cut into law. But if Fox & Friends is upset with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, he should really speak to to members of the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress who wrote the law that way. It shouldn't be too hard, since many of them now work for Fox.