As Lori Montgomery reports in the Washington Post, “Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made. The measure, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) this week, would permanently extend the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts that benefit virtually every U.S. taxpayer . . . .Unless Congress acts, the cuts will expire at the end of the year, raising taxes across the board. While Republicans want to preserve all the cuts, President Obama has called on lawmakers to extend them only for household incomes under $250,000 a year. That strategy, he argues, would knock hundreds of billions of dollars off the cost of extending the cuts, money that could be used to reduce the nation’s debt.”
Here are just a few people who benefit from this super-generous plan from the super-jowly McConnell: hedge fund managers David Tepper, who earned $4 billion in 2009; George Soros, who made $3.3 billion; James Simons, who made $2.5 billion; John Paulson, who made $2.3 billion; Steve Cohen, who made $1.4 billion; Carl Icahn and Edward Lampert, who each made $1.3 billion; Kenneth Griffin and John Arnold, who each made $900 million; and Philip Falcone, who snuck into the Top 10 with a piddly $825 million.
Something tells me we need a higher marginal tax rate for such earners. There’s no reason why these guys pay the same top rate that mere doctors and dentists and John Grisham do.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein in The Washington Post maintains “There is no policy that President Obama has passed or proposed that added as much to the deficit as the Republican Party’s $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts. In fact, if you put aside Obama’s plan to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts, there is no policy he has passed or proposed that would do half as much damage to the deficit. There is not even a policy that would do a quarter as much damage to the deficit. The stimulus bill, at $787 billion, would do about a fifth as much damage. But that’s actually misleading: The stimulus bill was a temporary expense . . . .Once it’s done, it’s done. An indefinite extension of the Bush tax cuts is, well, indefinite. It will cost $3.9 trillion in the first 10 years. And then it will cost more than that in the second 10 years. . . . [a]nd so on and on into eternity. Comparatively, the stimulus bill is a tiny fraction of that. The bank bailouts, which were passed by George W. Bush and the Democrats in 2006, will end up costing the government only $66 billion. The health-care bill improves the deficit outlook.”