As I pointed out the other day, raising the threshold on the highend Bush tax cuts, as proposed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is a great way to lose a bunch of revenue.
CBPP’s out today with our own analysis based on the score by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (my earlier post used a preliminary estimate by the group Citizens for Tax Justice–they got the same answer as JCT, proving once again that CTJ punches well above their weight). As the picture shows, you move the threshold on the expiring tax provision from $250K to $1 mil, you lose $366 billion over 10 years–44% of the total.
If we’re thinking about stabalizing the debt over the next decade, that $366bn loss has gotta be made up somewhere else. But as Marr and Huang point out in the CBPP brief, we keep taking more and more stuff off the table–we’re narrowing the base–until all that’s left is stuff that actually helps low-income people…the stuff we count on congressional Democrats to fight for (policies, btw, that Leader Pelosi has been a tireless and successful fighter for, often against tough odds).
So I remain unhappy and confuzzled by this move.
I think Speaker Pelosi is kind of burnt out. Wouldn’t you be, after three years of dealing with Obama and Reid, and a year and a half of Boehner?
raising the bar would leave the tax cuts in place for most members of congress…
I think rjs has it right but also more: Pelosi may be making a calculation that votes and financial support from people of incomes between $250K and $1M are important to hers, Congress’, and the President’s races in the fall.
The $1 mil threshold is Pelosi’s dare to the Repubs. They won’t take it and then Dems will continue to campaign on the issue that Repubs are protecting millionaires at the expense deficit reduction, their supposed main issue. After Obama’s reelection, the floor moves back to $250K in a “that was then, this is now” move.