Someone in the White House is going to have to have a serious sit-down with deficit peacocks Conrad and Lieberman, who are still pushing extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Luckily, the White House isn't listening. Yesterday Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, blogged about why extending the cuts for the wealthy is a bad idea.
President Obama has made it clear that he favors extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for middle-income families, but letting those for high-income earners expire as called for in current law. Recently, some have argued that extending the high-income cuts is necessary for the economy. This is simply wrong.
First, extending the high-income tax cuts would provide very little job creation in 2011. There is widespread agreement that the short-run economic benefits of high-income tax cuts are small. The Congressional Budget Office lists a tax cut for high-income earners as a particularly ineffective job creation measure. Private sector forecasters have reached the same judgment. The vast majority of economic research shows that higher-income earners spend less of a tax cut and so tax cuts to those earners create fewer jobs throughout the economy.
That doesn’t mean that all tax cuts are ineffective in creating growth. In fact, tax cuts designed in the right way can be highly effective. That is why the President supported numerous tax cuts in the Recovery Act and why continuing the middle-class tax cuts from 2001 and 2003 is so important.
Middle-class tax cuts can be stimulative, being more likely to be spent, raising demand and thus employment. And just as a quick reminder for those deficit peacocks, here's the deficit projection chart from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:
It's smart policy to let the tax cuts for the wealthy expire and it's also smart politics. It's also going to happen. Conrad and Lieberman just don't have the votes to do otherwise. The House will never take up an extension bill, other than for middle-class tax breaks, and the Senate wouldn't pass it.