Stay Strong, Boehner: We Don't Want No Stinkin' $3 Trillion Tax Hikes

The president is emphatic that taxes have to be raised. As a former small businessman, I know tax increases destroy jobs.

~ John Boehner

 
$3 trillion more in hand-outs to Big Government: that's what the Gang of Six figures you and your fellow Americans are good for.

Investors Business Daily points out that the Gang of Six has "employed some of the most egregious budget tricks available to make the spending cuts look bigger and tax hikes smaller than they actually are."

The best example of this is the plan's tax proposal, which alternately boasts that it cuts taxes by $1.5 trillion and raises them by $1 trillion, but which more likely will result in taxes going up by more than $3 trillion.

According to the outline, the $1.5 trillion in "tax relief" is how the Congressional Budget Office would score the plan.

But what the gang conveniently leaves out is that the CBO's forecast has $4.6 trillion in tax hikes already baked into it. That's because the CBO baseline assumes all the Bush tax cuts get repealed, that every other temporary tax cut is left to expire, and that the alternative minimum tax continues to entrap millions more middle-class families each year.

Once you take that into account, the $1.5 trillion in "tax relief" turns instead into a $3.1 trillion tax increase over the next decade. (It's anyone's guess where the gang got its $1 trillion tax hike figure.)

Meanwhile, Obama says he willing to take "less," and he is complaining that he is taking "a lot of heat" because of that. Obama calls his latest offer "an extraordinarily fair deal." 

There are no Congressional Budget Office reports detailing what the president means by "less." But it is safe to assume that their calculations will still take for granted the end of all Bush tax cuts and all other temporary tax cuts as well as the continuation of the alternative minimum tax, an extra tax that some people and small businesses have to pay on top of their regular tax.

 "It is hard to understand," groused the president, "why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal."

No, Mr. President. It's not hard to understand at all.

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