Tales from the Trail

Add Sarah Palin to the list of politicos who are not happy about the tax cut package President Barack Obama crafted with Republican lawmakers.

“I think it’s a lousy deal and we can do better for the American people,” the former Alaska governor said in an interview with ABC’s  “Good Morning America,” airing Friday.

Palin, a former Republican vice presidential nominee,  said it’s an issue that would be best left to the new Congress  that will be sworn-in  in January.

“It is better to wait until they are seated and get a good deal for the American public than to accept what I think is a lousy deal, because it creates a temporary economy with even more uncertainty for businesses and it does increase taxes,”  Palin said.

Palin, one of the potential challengers to Obama in the 2012 presidential campaign, expressed gratitude  for his compromise — or as she put it his “flip flop” — on his original promise not to extend tax cuts to people making more than $250, 000 per year.

The U.S. Senate went two different ways on the estate tax, which has been a contentious issue for years — a tax congressional Republicans have villified as the “death tax”.

Senators voted 51-48 to include a provision in the fiscal 2010 budget that called for exempting estates at $5 million for individuals and limiting the tax to 35 percent — though the measure is non-binding and could be stripped out when the legislation is melded with a separate budget that passed the House of Representatives.

The amendment provoked a moment of drama in an otherwise long day of voting in the Senate where Democratic leaders scrambled to find the votes to kill the amendment, which scores some political points to those who have rallied against the estate tax for years.