Happy New Year? (Opinion)

Call us optimists, call us naïve, or call us something in between the two, but we never believed our leaders in Washington, D.C, would take us tumbling over the fiscal cliff.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t grow increasingly frustrated with them as the days and hours passed until a last-minute and seemingly stopgap agreement was reached. But, sadly, we largely have become immune to the buffoonery that too often passes for politics these days.

Still, it’s hard not to breathe a sigh of relief when a scheduled tax hike on 99 percent of us is averted. And that, of course, is what grabbed most of the headlines.

Best we can tell, though, almost everybody now will bring home a slightly smaller paycheck thanks to a less heralded tax break that did expire. Yep, we’re talking about the payroll tax.

The payroll tax, first cut in 2009, most recently had been 4.2 percent of income. It now will return to 6.2 percent.

Granted, it was a temporary cut on a tax that helps fund Social Security. Allowing it to lapse is good for anyone who plans to collect Social Security.

For someone making in the neighborhood of $50,000 annually, though, it means your gross pay will be trimmed by about 80 bucks a month. (Note: There are limits involved, so, again, best we can tell, the most anybody stands to lose is about $2,300.)

Maybe it’s semantics, but that seems like a middle-class tax increase to us. And isn’t that what all the politicians swear they’re against?

But, hey, we’re not complaining. The last-minute deal did some good things, too.

For starters, it helped those Arkansans in need of emergency unemployment compensation. It also breathed some much-needed life into the state’s wind-energy industry.

Hopefully, the avoidance of the fiscal cliff also will prompt an uptick in the economy, one Northwest Arkansas has seemed on the verge of experiencing for the last year or so. Call us optimists, call us naïve, but we remain half-full in our belief good things are in store for our little corner of the world despite the antics in our nation’s capitol.