From Lori Montgomery of the WashPost we receive news of an instructive new study. Prepare yourselves for another stroll down the supply-side hall of mirrors:

A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday. New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.

More:

Republicans want to extend all the [Bush] cuts, which would cost the Treasury Department $238 billion in 2011, according to the taxation committee. President Obama and congressional Democrats have vowed to extend the cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and individuals making less than $200,000 -- 98 percent of American taxpayers -- in a plan that would add about $202 billion to next year's deficit.

Let's parse that for a moment. Republicans bay like rabid wolves about the deficit when Obama and the Democrats are trying to help poor and working people. Remember, GOP Senator Jim Bunning, with his colleagues' assent, filibustered a jobs and state aid bill earlier this year that cost a mere $16 billion because it didn't include "offsets," i.e., concomitant spending reductions. Conservatives, including several of you, got all high and might about this.

Ultimately, the Democrats got that passed, but to get it through, they had to pay for it by making cuts to food stamps. For our British friends, food stamps are grocery subsidies to the poorest Americans. Recipients must be near the poverty level, which is around $10,500 per annum for an individual.

That's point one. Point two: When campaigning for president, Obama had to pledge, as all Democrats since Walter Mondale have, that he would never raise a tax on middle-income people. By the way, taxes are at their lowest in the United States in something like 60 years.

But Obama had to make his sub-$250,000 pledge, or he probably would have lost the election. So he had to commit himself, if he wanted to be president, to a bad fiscal policy - one that, today, even Alan Effing Greenspan says should be reversed.

So because of political reality, Obama was forced to put his name on a package of tax cuts that will worsen the deficit by $202 billion next year. But - point three - for the Republicans, now that we're talking about tax cuts for the wealthy, that isn't enough, the deficit must be made even worse!

So $16 billion is outrageous when you're talking about the unemployed and teachers and people on food stamps, the greedy bastards. But when you're talking about millionaires, $202 billionvin additional deficit spending is too little. Let's sprinkle another $36 billion on top.

This prattling about small business people is just like the prattling about family farmers when they talked about the estate tax. I doubt very much that more than a small percentage of small business people are affected. This is for millionaires.

This is their agenda. If it's for millionaires, it's good. Period. It's never been quite this naked, but there it is. How the idiot Democrats are going to manage to lose to a bunch of people whose only real domestic agenda is to hand out $100,000 bills to millionaires, busting the budget while doing it, makes me sick to my stomach.

