“We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary, partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean.”-Pat Toomey, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania

“Go fuck yourself!”-John Boehner, Speaker of the House, reply to Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader

“More remains to be done to put U.S. public finances back on a sustainable path without harming the still fragile recovery.”-Gerry Rice, International Monetary Fund (IMF), commenting on the so called fiscal cliff deal in the United States

“As the IMF have said, anything short of a deep and wide reaching resolution will not be good enough this time around.”–Wayne Swan, Treasurer of Australia, commenting on the so called fiscal cliff deal in the United States

The so called budget agreement to avoid a fiscal cliff (austerity measures) is a total sham.  As I posted before, this fiscal cliff is a done deal.

Proof is the fact that there will be across the board 2% income/payroll tax increases for everyone, not just the wealthy!  So much for some of those states that recently raised their mandatory minimum wage levels (or maybe that’s why they raised it, they knew what was coming).

One small business owner said he can not afford to try and help his employees deal with the increased income tax by giving them a raise: “Any business that survived the recession did so by digging a big hole. We can’t dig any deeper.”-Mike Brey, Hobby Works

The 2% payroll tax increase comes as a temporary decrease on Social Security taxes ended with the first round of fiscal cliff BS.  That’s right, this is just first round.  Despite what the incompetent main stream U.S. TV media is reporting, there are more fiscal cliff hangers coming.

According to many economists, this latest deal does not cut spending enough, or at all, and the amount of increase in taxes is piddly, so the end result is deeper government debt.

Over the next two months there will be more fiscal cliff hangers, over the national debt ceiling, more taxes and government spending cuts.  Isn’t this what we’ve been seeing in several European countries in the past couple of years?