Harry Reid’s Sneaky Middle Class Tax Increase

In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore explains that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has attempted to quietly pass a tax increase on 28.8 million middle-class families. Even scarier for middle-class Americans is that the Obama administration is supporting Reid’s attempt, in direct conflict with the president’s promise not to raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year (which he has already broken numerous times). Below is an excerpt from Moore’s Over the Cliff We Go. (Our emphasis added).

The Democrats’ official position is to allow the tax cuts for the middle class but not for upper-income individuals. But as the Senate Finance Committee pointed out on Tuesday, the tax plan that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has offered would actually retain the alternative minimum tax provision to raise taxes on the non-rich, which would hammer the middle class. The Reid proposal—which is supported by the White House and passed yesterday in the Senate, 51-48, but is not expected to be considered in the House—”represents an almost $3,400 tax hike on 28.8 million middle-class families,” the committee’s analysis shows.

“They almost have to raise taxes on the middle class,” says House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, “Where else could the money come from?” Good question.

So it’s not just the rich who will get flattened if Congress jumps off the tax cliff, but tens of millions of middle-class families as well. The tax-the-rich plan reduces the deficit only by about 5 percent (if it raises any money at all), and Democrats don’t want to cut spending. This means they have to go after the wallets of those in the middle if they want to reduce the $1.2 trillion deficit. At some point the tab for Obamanomics has to be paid, and there aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires to pick it up.