Gird those old loins people. The congressional super committee has barely been up and running a week or so, and already Democrats and Republicans are pulling it in opposite directions, like two kindergarten girls fighting over a Raggedy Ann doll — if either side pulls too hard, they threaten to tear the whole thing apart. The party doing most of the pulling, not surprisingly, is the Republicans, with House Speaker John Boehner bluntly laying down a limit on the committee's mandate: no new taxes.
That, while the Democrats, in the form of Nancy Pelosi and the president, have gone to pains to emphasize that every option, including raised revenues, should remain on the table. Unwilling to let Boehner dictate the terms of the game, President Obama has decided to call his bluff. Late yesterday, the White House announced that the president plans to unveil this Tuesday a $2 trillion deficit-reduction plan — a fair bit more than the $1.5 trillion the super committee has been tasked with slashing — that includes a tax on the country's 500,000-or-so millionaires, and which will be dubbed the "Buffett Tax."
Naturally, Republicans are going to have a field day with this, dusting off the old trickledown economics anecdote that rich people with more money in their pockets go on to invest it in creating new jobs. In fact, looks like Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, author of the GOP's budget plan, has already gotten that ball rolling….
Read more at http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/obama_proposes_millionaire_buf.html
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