Details are emerging about the budget package that President Obama will release tomorrow, and it doesn’t look pretty:
WASHINGTON — President Obama will propose further tax increases on the affluent to help pay for his promise to make health care more accessible and affordable, administration officials said on Wednesday. That plan, coming after recent years in which more wealth became concentrated at the top of the income scale, introduces a politically volatile new edge to the emerging Congressional debate over the new president’s top domestic priorities.
Mr. Obama will also propose in the budget outline he releases on Thursday to use revenues from the centerpiece of his environmental policy — a plan under which companies will have to purchase permits to exceed pollution emission caps — to pay for an extension of a two-year tax credit that benefits low and middle-income people.
The combined effect of the two proposals, on top of Mr. Obama’s existing plan to roll back the Bush-era income tax reductions on upper-income households, would be a pronounced move to redistribute wealth and reimpose a substantially larger share of the tax burden on the most affluent taxpayers.
And it’s not just the so-called “rich” who might end up seeing their taxes go up either:
Administration officials suggested to senior aides in Congress on Wednesday that revenues could be raised by ending the longstanding policy of excluding the value of employer-provided health insurance from income taxes. But the officials emphasized that the administration was not advocating that option, which has long been anathema to organized labor and to some businesses. A more modest variation would be to cap the amount of tax-excludable benefits, which would hit the most generous health insurance plans that tend to go only to company executives.
Even in it’s most modest form, a proposal like this would mean higher taxes, or lower benefits, for all Americans.
That doesn’t sound like change I want to believe in.
