Do Partisan Politics Spell Tax Hikes?

Curtis Dubay / November 08, 2010

One of the most pressing pieces of legislation that the lame duck Congress must deal with is the impending expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax relief.

Led by President Obama, the Democrats have long argued for extending the tax relief for families making less than $250,000 a year while raising taxes on those families and small businesses that earn above that arbitrary threshold. Despite election results that clearly show that Americans do not want tax hikes, even if they are just on “the rich,” Democrats have devised a new strategy to do just that.

Their new plan, according to Politico, is to raise the threshold of what is “rich” from $250,000 of annual income for a family to $500,000 or $1 million. The second stage of the plan is to permanently separate the middle-income tax cuts from the tax cuts for the rich. They would do this by permanently extending the tax cuts for middle-income taxpayers and only temporarily extending them for the rich. (more…)