Congress did something smart

Yes you read that correctly. The Congress did something wise, it only took an election coming up to give them the correct motivation to do it. If they didn't the voters would most likely take revenge on those up for re-election by not returning them to office.

What did Congress do? Well they voted to extend the Bush tax cuts that were set to expire at the end of this year.

The legislation would extend the $1,000-per-child tax credit, rather than letting it slip back to $700 next year. It would extend tax breaks for married couples that otherwise would also have to be trimmed in 2005. And it would prevent the 10 percent income-tax bracket from being applied to smaller amounts of earned income, as was the case in the past.

Congress also modified the AMT so not as many people will be swept into it, but that will only last a year.

The tax bill also contains a number of business tax cuts, some which I think could have expired, but oh well.

John Kerry did vote for the tax bill (the article didn't say how Edwards voted) which is not surprising. If Kerry had voted against this, the Republicans would attack him very severely over this.

A number of Democrats were not happy about voting for the tax cuts for various reasons, but in the end they didn't have much choice but to vote for it as two Democrats said:

"Who would contest these types of things?" asked Rep. Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Ultimately, few would vote against an election-year bill to avert tax increases on middle-class families.

"This is political," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. "My advice to my colleagues is, when they are dealing politically on the floor, you deal with it any way you need to deal with it."

Hat tip Hugh Hewitt

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at National Review Online brought up an interesting point that I didn't catch (that is not really much of a surprise I know). "The Post neglected to mention that Kerry did not return to Capitol Hill to vote on these tax cuts. So he "backed it," in the sense that he "issued a press release about it.""

So Kerry issued a press release to show his support but didn't bother to come back and vote. I expect the Republicans to make that fact known that Kerry couldn't be bothered to come back to vote for the tax cuts.