Vice President Joe Biden said today that he and President Obama will fight to end the "morally troubling" yet newly renewed tax cuts for rich Americans in the re-election year of 2012.
"The one target for us in two years is no longer extending the upper income tax credit for millionaires and billionaires, and scaling back what we had to do to get the compromise, the estate tax for the very wealthy," Biden said on NBC's Meet The Press.
"We're coming back and going at it again," Biden later added.
Obama agreed to a two-year extension of the high-end tax cuts because otherwise Senate Republicans would have blocked extensions for all Americans, leading to higher tax bills, Biden said. The lower tax rates signed by President George W. Bush were due to expire at the end of the year.
"We got to the end, we couldn't get it done,"Biden said. "And we had to make a decision: Were we gonna let the middle-class tax cuts expire?
"Life is a matter of really tough choices," Biden also said.
The vice president noted that Obama's agreement with Republicans includes a payroll tax cut, a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits, and the renewal of tax breaks that benefit the middle class on such items as college tuition.
Biden said he is confident that Congress will allow the high-end tax cuts to expire in 2012, even though he and Obama will be up for re-election, and even though Republicans will be running the House and have bigger numbers in the Senate.
The reasons: Concerns about the rising federal debt, and the cost to the government of the high-bracket tax cuts.
"We will be able to make the case much more clearly that spending $700 billion over 10 years to extend tax cuts for people whose income averages well over a million dollars does not make sense," Biden said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had wanted to extend all the tax cuts permanently, said Republicans will spend the next two years "reducing spending and debt, and I hope the president will join us in reducing both spending and debt."
(Posted by David Jackson)
0 comments:
Post a Comment