Republicans, Democrats still battling over Bush-era tax cuts

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are still debating whether to extend tax cuts approved by Congress in 2001 and 2003 during George W. Bush’s presidency. The tax cuts, passed during a time of budget surpluses, expire at the end of the year.

The L.A. Times reports that today in Cleaveland, President Barack Obama used the debate over Bush-era tax breaks to make a populist pitch, shaping the coming congressional midterm election as a choice between Democrats who support policies to advance the middle class and Republicans who would return to policies that created only “the illusion of prosperity.”

“Make no mistake: He [House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)] and his party believe we should … give a permanent tax cut to the wealthiest 2% of Americans,” Obama said. “With all the other budgetary pressures we have, with all the Republicans’ talk about wanting to shrink the deficit, they would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about $100,000 each to folks who are already millionaires.”

The White House’s deputy communications director Jen Psaki keeps the offensive going in a blog post railing Boehner:

“In an interview this morning [Bohner] issued a half-hearted call for a two year extension of these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. This is nothing more than a throwback to Bush-era budget gimmicks that helped get us into the fiscal mess we’re in today, an attempt to mask the true budget-busting cost of the Republican agenda. If there was any doubt about that, it was eliminated when immediately after the interview he issued a press release making clear the Party’s continuing desire to borrow more than $700 billion to make these tax cuts permanent.”

CNN reports that despite Obama’s accusation that Republicans are holding middle class income tax cuts “hostage,” the reality is several Democratic senators also oppose allowing Bush’s tax cuts for higher earners to expire. Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have each publicly expressed concern about the impact of raising taxes, even on the well-to-do, during an economic downturn.

Associated Press reports that Obama’s current proposals to stimulate the economy are seen as “no quick cure”:

Last month, The Hawaii Independent‘s conservative columnist Steve Jackson explored arguments for and against the tax cuts by Hawaii’s Congressional candidates.