Message #27824

[Mark]

Obama to open talks with $1.6 trillion plan to raise taxes on corporations, wealthy

President Obama is taking a hard line with congressional Republicans heading into negotiations over the year-end “fiscal cliff,” making no opening concessions and calling for far more in new taxes than Republicans have so far been willing to consider.

Obama plans to open talks using his most recent budget proposal, which sought to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy by $1.6 trillion over the next decade, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday. That’s double the sum that House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) offered Obama during secret debt negotiations in 2011.

Obama has been pressing to let the George W. Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of the year for the wealthiest 2 percent of the nation’s households, a tax hike adamantly opposed by Republicans. But Carney suggested that even the revenue generated by letting those tax cuts end would not be enough to tame the national debt and reenergize the economy.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and other senior Democrats on Tuesday said Obama would not be willing to maintain the Bush tax rates in exchange for a cap on deductions for households earning more than $250,000 a year, a leading Republican alternative.

“I don’t see how you do this without higher rates. I don’t think there’s any feasible, realistic way to do it,” Geithner said at a conference in Washington. “When you take a cold, hard look at the amount of resources you can raise from that top 2 percent of Americans through limiting deductions, you will find yourself disappointed relative to the magnitude of the revenue increases that we need.”

Democrats said Obama is likely to maintain a tough stance Friday, when Boehner and other congressional leaders are due to gather at the White House for their first face-to-face discussions about how to avoid the fiscal cliff. Fresh off a resounding electoral victory in which they kept the White House and picked up seats in the House and Senate, Democrats said there is no reason to compromise now on a central plank of the president’s platform.

“It was an intrinsic part of his campaign, and the public supports it. So what more do you want?” said Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.), the senior Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

GOP reaction

Although Republicans have offered fresh revenue in a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, they have not proposed a specific target. Boehner suggested that negotiations resume on terms discussed in 2011, when he offered to raise $800 billion over the next decade through a rewrite of the tax code. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) endorsed that general idea Tuesday but warned Obama not to overplay his hand, noting that the president’s $1.6 trillion tax request failed to receive a single vote in Congress in the spring.

“We’re calling on him to lead, to take the initiative, propose a plan that’s actually designed to succeed,” McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “I’m not asking the president . . . to adopt our principles. I’m simply asking him to respect our principles by not insisting that we compromise them. Because we won’t.”

rest: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-to-open-fiscal-talks-with-plan-to-raise-taxes-on-wealthy/2012/11/13/9984cd78-2dc1-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html?wprss=rss_national