House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Congress should pass the “Buffett rule” and raise taxes on people making more than $2 million per year.
“Republicans refuse — refuse, for example, to end tax subsidies to big oil, refuse to have millionaires — people making over $2 million a year — pay their fair share,” Pelosi said on Thursday at the Capitol.
In legislation to avoid the fiscal cliff, Congress raised taxes starting in January 2013 on couples making over $450,000 per year and individuals making more than $400,000. The Daily Caller asked Pelosi to clarify what tax increases she wants Republicans to support.
“When people talk about a spending problem, they should be including the tax expenditures because they are a cost to the economy, to our federal budget. And the — and just to go back to the ‘Buffet rule,’ the 30 percent that Mr. Van Hollen is talking about there, under the bill that was passed at the end of last year, you know, the rate for people making that much money would be 39.6 percent,” Pelosi said.
“This says you can take some deductions, but you cannot have your tax bill go below 30 percent. So they still have about 10 points of deductions that they can take and it’s just as Mr. Buffett said: He shouldn’t be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, and that’s what people will do if they can take an endless number of loopholes. But all of those loopholes, whether it’s big oil, subsidies for big oil, $38 billion, $37 billion over 10 years, all of those are expenditures. They’re what we call tax expenditures. So put them in the spending column, and let’s cut those too.”