Reid Web site
Here's a
grand idea.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is eyeing a tax on the nation’s highest earners as a way to defray some of the $447 billion price tag for the White House-written jobs package-a move that would shift attention away from its underlying policies and more towards party politics.
Sources on and off Capitol Hill said Reid wants to swap out the bill’s current rack of “pay-fors,” and replace them with a package including a surtax of 5 percent on millionaires.[...]
Reid gave no specifics, but said the president is open to changes.
“He’s not locked into anything he put into that bill as it relates to pay-fors,” he added.
White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer echoed Reid’s sentiment, telling POLITICO that Obama has not been sold on any one approach.
TPM's Brian Beutler has more, explaining that the enforcement mechanism—the trigger—in the debt ceiling deal to enact an automatic "series of new taxes on wealthy Americans, including oil and gas companies, hedge fund managers and others," if the Super Congress fails is a problem for some in the Democratic caucus. President Obama wants the Super Congress to increase its deficit reduction target by enough to pay for the jobs bill, and this surtax could replace some of the more unpopular proposals.
It's certainly a popular idea. The ABC News/WaPo poll Jed Lewison wrote about earlier found that "seventy-five percent of Americans support raising taxes on Americans with annual incomes over $1 million."
Taxing millionaires in fact is one of the rare political issues to draw bipartisan majority support—57 percent from Republicans, 75 percent among independents and 89 percent among Democrats. Even among supporters of the Tea Party political movement, 55 percent support raising taxes on millionaires, although this drops to 36 percent of "strong" Tea Party backers.
Oh, those "populist" teabaggers, looking out for the one percenters. It will be that 36 percent of teabaggers that rule Republicans, of course, along with Grover Norquist. Which is all the more reason Democrats should embrace the idea and run with it, and paint the Republicans as obstructionists who would rather protect millionaires than put people back to work. It's a winner.