Obama Wants to Raise Taxes on Small Businesses

Republicans Rebuff Obama’s Call to Raise Taxes on Small Business

June 24 , 2011

Wintery Knight - First, an article explaining how the Obama administration wants to raise taxes on small businesses.

Excerpt:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”

The administration’s plan to raise the tax rate on small businesses is part of its plan to raise taxes on all Americans who make more than $250,000 per year—including businesses that file taxes the same way individuals and families do.

Geithner’s explanation of the administration’s small-business tax plan came in an exchange with first-term Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). Ellmers, a nurse, decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 after she became active in the grass-roots opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reform plan in 2009.

“Overwhelmingly, the businesses back home and across the country continue to tell us that regulation, lack of access to capital, taxation, fear of taxation, and just the overwhelming uncertainties that our businesses face is keeping them from hiring,” Ellmers told Geithner. “They just simply cannot.”

[...]When Ellmers finally told Geithner that “the point is we need jobs,” he responded that the administration felt it had “no alternative” but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”—including federal education spending.

So what about the Republicans in the House? Are they going to cave in to the Democrat demands for more taxes on job creators?

CNS News reports that House Republicans categorically refuse to raise taxes during a recession.

Excerpt:

Two days after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) dodged the question of whether Republicans would insist that any increase in the debt limit in this fiscal year would be exceeded by spending cuts in this fiscal year, the congressman walked out of debt/budget talks with Vice President Joe Biden, stating he could not continue as long as the Democrats insisted that taxes be raised as part of a budget deal.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), meanwhile, maintained that tax increases were off the table and that spending cuts should exceed any increase in the federal debt limit.

“Each side came into these talks with certain orders, and as it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases,” said Cantor in a statement released on Thursday. “[T]he tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue. Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting.”

Both Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have consistently said that any budget deal for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 and a vote on raising the debt limit—from $14.29 trillion to potentially $16.79 trillion (a $2.5 trillion increase)—would not include raising taxes.

After Cantor left the talks with Biden, along with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Boehner held a press conference and said, “Listen, we’ve got to stop spending money that we don’t have and, since the beginning, the Majority Leader [Canotor] and myself, along with Sen. McConnell and Sen. Kyl have been clear: tax hikes are off the table.”

“First of all: raising taxes is going to destroy jobs,” said Boehner. “If you raise taxes on the people that we need to grow our economy and to hire new workers, guess what? They’re not going to do it if they have to pay higher taxes to the federal government.”

“Second, a tax hike cannot pass the U.S. House of Representatives,” said the Speaker. “It’s not just a bad idea, it doesn’t have the votes and it can’t happen. And third, the American people don’t want us to raise taxes. They know that we’ve got a spending problem. That’s why Republicans passed a budget [drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin] that pays down debt over time without raising taxes.”

But what about the Republicans in the Senate? Aren’t they usually more liberal than the Republicans in the House?

CNS News reports that Republicans in the Senate are absolutely opposed to increasing taxes in a recession.

Excerpt:

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told CNSNews.com that he would “absolutely not” support any tax increases as part of a deal to increase the debt limit.

Lee was asked if he agreed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that revenue increases should be part of a negotiation on the debt limit because spending cuts alone are “irresponsible.”

“I’m fine with revenue increases as long as they don’t involve tax increases. There are other ways of increasing revenue. They could expand their use of federal public land through extension of oil and gas leases and so forth. If they want that kind of revenue increase, I’m all for that,” said Lee after endorsing the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge” during a press conference at the Capitol on Wednesday.

Politicians who support the pledge vow to vote against raising the debt limit unless Congress adopts a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and implements budget cuts and caps on federal spending.

Lee was then asked if he would support any tax increases, specifically.

“No. Absolutely not. We can’t afford a double dip recession right now, and that’s exactly where that would take us,” said Lee.

“You take the same people whose investment dollars are needed to create jobs and you penalize them and you tell them you’re going to get to keep less of your, the rewards from your investment than you would otherwise take — that’s going to chill rather than promote investment. And if you do that, we’re going to have fewer jobs rather than more at a time when we can least afford to hemorrhage jobs.”

House and Senate Republicans understand that we need jobs, and that raising taxes will hurt job creation. Obama’s answer to everything is always more taxing and more spending and more borrowing. The Republicans have got to hold firm and take away his credit card. We need an intervention.

Obama Justifies Raising Taxes as Cutting Spending in Tax Code

July 5, 2011

CNSNews.com – President Barack Obama continues to call for tax hikes, invoking the need to tackle “spending in the tax code” as he targets what he says are special breaks for “millionaires and billionaires.”

During his weekly address on Saturday, Obama added to the populist rhetoric that featured during his White House press conference last week, when he said Americans must choose between paying for perks going to corporate jet owners and hedge fund managers, or paying for medical research and college scholarships.

In his weekly address, Obama appeared to say that taxes not collected by the federal government were the same as expenditures.

“Over the last few weeks, the vice president and I have gotten both parties to identify more than $1 trillion in spending cuts,” he said. “That’s trillion with a ‘t.’ But after a decade in which Washington ran up the country’s credit card, we’ve got to find more savings to get out of the red.”

“That means looking at every program and tax break in the budget – every single one – to find places to cut waste and save money,” the president continued.

“It means we’ll have to make tough decisions and scale back worthy programs. And nothing can be off limits, including spending in the tax code, particularly the loopholes that benefit very few individuals and corporations.”

Obama then suggested that Americans were faced with a stark choice.

“Now, it would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them,” he said. “Because if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help – then we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else. We’ve got to say to a student, ‘You don’t get a college scholarship.’ We have to say to a medical researcher, ‘You can’t do that cancer research.’ We might have to tell seniors, ‘You have to pay more for Medicare.’”

In the Republican response, Sen. Dan Coates of Indiana said Obama and congressional Democrats “must recognize that their game plan is not working. It’s time to acknowledge that more government and higher taxes is not the answer to our problem.”

Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute, argued that tax cuts or loopholes cannot be compared to expenditures, and warned Republicans not to “fall for this sophistry.”

“If legislation is enacted that results in more money coming into Washington, that is a tax increase,” Mitchell wrote.

Tax breaks do not constitute spending, he said.

“When politicians tax (or borrow) money from one person and give it to another, that’s government spending. But if politicians allow a person keep more of their own money, that’s a tax cut.’”

Mitchell also acknowledged that the tax code is “riddled with inefficient and corrupt loopholes.”

“But those provisions should be eliminated as part of a fundamental tax reform, such as a flat tax. More specifically, every penny of revenue generated by shutting down tax preferences should be used to lower tax rates. This is a win-win situation that would make America more prosperous and competitive.”