Critique-Fiscal Cliff affecting holiday season

         This article interest me due to the fact of how important Christmas is to our culture and how affects and is a truly important factor in discussing economic growth during this time of the year. As we learned in class and have seen many times on the news, America is approaching a so called 'fiscal cliff' that is rapidly becoming closer in the next couple of weeks. This fiscal cliff is caused by the Bush Administrations tax reforms that are soon coming to an end. Although the author of the article only states one perspective(the White House) to the story by strongly making a statement about the question he poses in the beginning of the article, I do think the piece is well written and poses a serious question about our upcoming current economic situation.
           Having read previous articles about the fiscal cliff and given my current political stand point, I completely agree with what the author has to say. It makes sense that if we do not come to an agreement about taxes and (hopefully) come to a sensible solution on lowering taxes for middle classes, then consumer confidence will decrease causing people to spend less money on their annual Christmas shop. This including Black Friday which is as we all know one of, if not the busiest days of the year for most firms and corporations. The author brings up several statistics saying that the holiday season "accounts for 1/5th of annual income sales". At this rate we cannot afford to impose tax increases on middle class families or individuals. These middle classes make up well over the majority of our country and it makes absolutely no sense to raise taxes on these people who essentially contribute to the economy more than anyone else on a daily basis. It becomes hard to truly take sides in this argument simply because the numbers do not add up. Fears and rumors about these tax increases on middle class families haven't really brought out fear in consumers with this Thanksgiving weekend hit a record high 59.1 billion dollars. I personally think that when we do spend this money (if and when) that we should try to spend it wisely and try to spend more money through local businesses as opposed to lazily traveling to the nearest Walmart. It is certainly no question that investing money in more local business on a large scale can help move towards a more balanced economy and a more balanced distribution of income. When more of these middle classes (most of whom own these small local businesses and are only in the middle class because of the large corporations that have taken over their neighborhoods and towns) have more income, then they in turn have a higher disposable income which means consumer spending with rise causing an increase in GDP.