| Obama Escalates Class Warfare |
| Jul-09-2012 |
| Keywords: jobs report, stocks, slump, selloff, wall street, |
Looking to change the topic of conversation on Capitol Hill, President Obama today pushed for an extension of some of the Bush-era tax cuts.
The president urged Congress to extend for a one year extension to the tax cuts, but only for those households earning less than $250,000 a year.
The president said he wants to break through the "stalemate" over taxes in Congress. He argued that sustaining the current tax rates for top earners puts too big a hole in the federal budget.
Obama called on Congress to extend the tax cuts, for one year, for families earning under $250,000 -- failure to do so, he said, would be a "blow" to families and a "drag" on the economy.
"We don't need more top-down economics," Obama said. "We need policies that grow and strengthen the middle class.
The president urged Congress to pass a bill that deals with the middle-class tax rates only, and then move on to a separate debate over extending the rates for top earners. Obama, though, made clear he is opposed to doing so.
The move is sure to spark further claims the president is looking to divide the country along economic lines. A strategy employed by the Obama campaign in its criticism of Republican challenger Mitt Romney's tax returns and offshore bank accounts.
"We have to continue to grow our economy. We have to grow it from the middle class out," Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs said Monday in an interview on NBC's "Today" show. "But for millionaires and billionaires, they don't need a tax cut," he added.
Obama's decision to set $250,000 as the threshold for the tax extension also puts him at odds with many congressional Democratic leaders who had called extending the rates for families earning below $1,000,000 a year.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has suggested that many families making $250,000 are not rich. "They are not rich, and in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that's associated with wealth in America," he said last year.
Obama is expected to promote his tax policy at a series of events this week in battleground states. The president's shift to the tax debate follows Friday's dismal jobs report showing the nation's unemployment at 8.2 percent, and the weakest quarter for job growth in two years, with average monthly job growth of just 75,000 jobs in April, May and June.
Referred to by some as a financial cliff, the Bush-era tax cuts are due to expire at the end of the year unless Congress votes to extend them. Economists worry that tax increases, along with automatic spending cuts also scheduled to go into effect at the end of the year, could be a blow to the shaky U.S. economy. |
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Posted by Lou Dobbs Staff at 8:00 AM Email to a friend |
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