By John Palm, Editor
GCN Live.com
The proposed plan introduces $1.5 trillion in new taxes and would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion over the next 10 years.
Courtesy Getty Images
Cuts will include $580 billion decrease to mandatory benefits programs, with $248 billion coming from Medicare. In addition, the plan counts savings of $1 trillion over the next decade from troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The deficit reduction plan follows his proposed $447 billion short-term tax cuts introduced last week.
President Obama’s tax reform is guided by five principles: lowering tax rates; eliminating wasteful loopholes and tax breaks; reducing the deficit by $1.5 trillion; boosting job creation and growth; and being consistent with the “Buffett Rule.”
Republicans are already attacking the President’s plan.
“When the president does things like this, it leads me to believe that he’s not in bipartisan consensus-making mood. He’s in a political class warfare mode and campaign mode. And that’s not good for our economy,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Ryan continued: “”If you tax something more, you get less of it. If you tax job creators more, you get less job creation. If you tax their investment more, you get less investment.”
Meanwhile, Obama created his own attack by saying he would veto any proposed Medicare benefit cuts that are not paired with tax increases to the wealthy.
“This is not class warfare – it’s math,” said Obama this morning from the White House Rose Garden.
“The money has to come from some place,” he continued. “If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit… the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more, we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.”
“Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership,” Speaker of the House John Boehner fired back Monday following the President’s speech. “The Joint Select Committee is engaged in serious work to tackle a serious problem: the debt crisis that is making it harder to get our economy growing and create more American jobs. Unfortunately, the president has not made a serious contribution to its work today. This administration’s insistence on raising taxes on job creators and its reluctance to take the steps necessary to strengthen our entitlement programs are the reasons the president and I were not able to reach an agreement previously, and it is evident today that these barriers remain.”