A repeat of the debt ceiling battle?
When President Obama proposed we actually do something to reduce unemployment, it was met with the usual skepticism among Republicans: We can't possibly pay for it! Ignoring the obvious points of (1) GOP indifference to paying for anything, pre-2008, and (2) whether sensible long term economic strategy might indeed trade increased deficits now for a more robust economy later, the White House has released its own pay-for plan. All told it
looks pretty familiar:
Most of the new funds, Lew said, would be attained by limiting itemized deductions for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000, a plan President Obama has tried to push since his campaign days. Taking these steps would raise roughly $400 billion over 10 years, Lew said. [...]
The administration also include a long-time policy goal of taxing the income investment fund managers make, known as carried interest, as regular income instead of as capital gains, which has a lower 15 percent tax rate. So far, Wall Street has strongly resisted any attempt to increase the rate on so-called carried interest. That change alone, would provide an infusion of $18 billion in revenue, according to administration officials.
The elimination of a tax break for the oil and gas industry would raise another $40 billion, and another $3 billion would come from changing the way corporate jets depreciate. Combined with a few other smaller revenue raises, Lew said the total measures proposed by the administration would bring in $467 billion, with some "wiggle room" -- $20 billion more than the cost of Obama's jobs bill, to ensure there's room to account for Congress' bean counters score the total a bit differently.
These are all repairs to the tax code that the administration has proposed before, during the deficit debacle, only to be met with Republican cries of class warfare! and we can't tax job creators! and all of the rest of it. Screw the economy and screw the jobless, we can't possibly change the depreciation schedule on corporate jets or insist that the well-off asses that helped wreck the economy pay the same tax rates as anyone else.
So it remains to be seen what happens next. Eric Cantor is already calling it a non-starter, just as he did when any of these tax fixes were proposed during the debt limit "crisis." Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul will I'm sure pipe up with demands that we not fix any infrastructure anywhere, just as soon as both of them figure out how to get across the Ohio River. (Proposal: Swim for it, and if you don't make it then you were just a drain on society anyway.)
