President Barack Obama has shifted his central argument against the Bush-era tax cuts to make the income gap as much a voter concern as the budget gap.
Since Sept. 3, Obama has chided Republicans for wanting to extend tax cuts for “millionaires and billionaires” — a line he repeated in a morning television interview, a weekly radio address, backyard chats in Des Moines and Albuquerque, and three times during one speech at a community college in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Before then, administration economists cast taxing the wealthy largely as a matter of fiscal prudence — a way to free up $700 billion from the deficit over the next 10 years.
Administration officials are betting that emphasizing fairness will resonate with voters in the November elections as Democrats struggle to save their majorities on Congress. The pitch is bolstered by research from Emmanuel Saez, a University of California economist, that shows middle-class incomes stagnated in the five years before the recession, then suffered the biggest drop since the Great Depression.
“If you start talking about fairness, then it’s clear,” said Alan Krueger, the Treasury Department’s chief economist. “The middle class has struggled over the past 10 years. Given what’s happened in recent decades, given who benefitted from past tax cuts, which group would you protect?”
Full Story: Obama’s Tax Pitch: Income Gap That Millionaires Should Fill – Bloomberg