Just hours after President Obama unveiled his
tax proposal Saturday night that ask corporations and the rich to their
part and stop forcing the middle class to bear the brunt of the burden, repugicans are already wailing about taxes and fear-mongering,
claiming the proposals will hurt the middle class, tax cuts for the
middle class don’t help the economy (LOL), and the usual cries of
liberty (for the rich).
However, there is no legitimate reason why repugicans, who claim to be all about tax cuts, won’t help the
President reform the tax code in a way that stops abusing the middle
class. Matt O’Brien, who covers economic affairs for the Washington
Post, explained in a tweet, “Obama wants to increase taxes on rentiers & heirs, 99 percent of which would come from the top 1 percent.”
In fact, some of Obama’s plan would hit the top .001 percent, according to O’Brien’s calculations in the Washington Post, and it incentivizes work for middle class families.
Obama’s State of the Union, you see, will call for $320 billion of new taxes on rentiers, their heirs, and the big banks to pay for $175 billion of tax credits that will reward work. In other words, it’s fighting a two-front war against a Piketty-style oligarchy where today’s hedge funders become tomorrow’s trust funders. First, it’s trying to slow the seemingly endless accumulation of wealth among the top 1, and really the top 0.1, no actually the top 0.001, percent by raising capital gains taxes on them while they’re living and raising them on their heirs when they’re dead. And second, it’s trying to help the middle help itself by subsidizing work, child care, and education.
Basically, President Obama is trying to reinvigorate
the notion this country was founded on — opportunity if you’re willing
to work hard. Seems like everything repugicans claim they are for. And
in fact, some of Obama’s proposals are ideas repugicans can agree to or
have even touted in the past.
But we all know that repugicans won’t give the
middle class a break if it involves having corporations/ the rich pay
their fair share.
The problem for repugicans is that this is a set up
for 2016, and so repugicans can’t very well tell the middle class to
get lost.
This is why repugicans’ new argument seems to be
heading toward “Only tax cuts for rich people grow the economy.” The repugicans have only two other choices: Pushing the flat tax, which
unfairly burdens the poor and middle class, or pushing their old tired
stand by that when they are in power, “deficits don’t matter”.
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