Washington – President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers.
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A White House official said the proposal would be included in the president’s proposal for long term deficit reduction that he will announce Monday. The official spoke anonymously because the plan has not been officially announced.
The measure would be in addition to $447 billion in new tax revenue that Obama is seeking to pay for his short-term spending and tax cutting plan to jump start the economy.
House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday he would oppose tax increases to reduce the deficit. Boehner has urged Congress’ deficit “supercommittee” to lay the groundwork for a broad overhaul of the U.S. tax code.
The panel has almost unlimited authority to recommend changes in federal spending and taxes and is working against a deadline of Nov. 23.
Boehner said the panel has “only one option, spending cuts and entitlement reforms,” a reference to government benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Any broad compromise that clears the bipartisan committee is almost certain to require Democratic agreement to savings from programs such as Social Security and Medicare, along with Republican acquiescence to additional revenues, although any such tradeoffs are rarely discussed openly until the last possible moment in negotiations.
Obama’s new tax proposal was first reported by the New York Times.
A million dollars is clearly a good income but no longer that rich. Many New York couples where both husband and wife work in banking, law or high tech companies easily make a million dollars annually but the costs of living here are also very high considering the cost of condos, yeshivas etc. Obama should focus his effort on the truly wealthy and not the upper middle class.
If its the “Buffet Rule”, it should apply to billionaires, not millionaires. And the problem is, it starts off at a million and soon enough, it will apply to those “rich” folks making $150,000.
There he goes on again with the class warfare. Doesn’t Obama think about ANYTHING besides confiscatory taxation?
For goodness sakes! Read the article! He wants to close loopholes that allow millionaires to pay a smaller percentage of their income than people earning less money. It doesn’t say he wants to raise taxes on millionaires, it says he wants to make them pay the same percentage as middle income earners.
Tell me what you have against millionaires paying the same percentage as middle income earners.
Here he goes again avoiding the real problem. He’s trying to come up with ways to bring in more money rather than ways to cut back on spending. I think all of Washington is out of control!
You guys are funny. If the Israeli government cut food, rent, education and medical subsidies you’d be yelling that they are anti-charaidi. When Rush demands the same thing and the Tea Party delivers you applaud.
A million dollars doesn’t go very far in the same way that a baseball diamond only has seating for 75,000 people.
Tax and spend; spend and tax; spend and tax; spend and tax. Give them more taxes and in a years time they are back for more. Enough is enough. Cut and let them live within their means; like the tax payers have to do. obama is looking for class warfare; because he is a marxist
It’s very easy to cut spending—-stop all the wars in which the US is involved. Until that point, however, we must find ways to pay for them.
By the way, did you know that the Republicans want to lower the threshold for federal taxes? That is, those people who are making too little money to pay federal income taxes (although they pay state tax, local tax, social security and disability tax, and sales tax) are now being targeted by Fox News and the Republicans. I would prefer that someone making a million dollars (as mentioned in post #1 ) pay a few extra hundred dollars rather than the guy who’s making $30,000 and trying to raise a family.
Here’s the real problem. Over the last 23 years or so we have opened up so many tax loopholes that apply to the “rich”. Bush 41 started us down this path, affectionately called “trickle down economics”. It said that if we give huge tax breaks at the top, they will hire more people and buy more ‘stuff’. This was a complete 180-degree turn from Reagan’s successful policies which followed the Keynesian Economic Theory which said that various taxes must be increased and decreased according to market conditions in order to promote stable demand. Clinton was also a Keynesian.
You’ll note that by the time we finally threw Bush 41 out of office, he was well on the way to bankrupting our nation.
Sadly, Bush 43 was insisted on going down that same failed path, and we gave him 2 terms to successfully bankrupt our nation.
Rich people do not just hire people because you give them more money. That is a joke. Companies hire when they need more staff to meet increased demand. Rich people buy fancy vacation homes in St. Barts which creates NO demand at all. The MIDDLE CLASS use their tax breaks to buy stuff, creating huge DEMAND. That’s the ONLY PROVEN way to create jobs.