Obama Wallops Republicans With The Facts About Their Plan To Cut Taxes For The Rich

President Obama used facts and math to reveal the true agenda behind the Republican plan to cut taxes for the wealthy during an event in Charlotte, NC.

The President said:

Now, it is significant that today is Tax Day. If you haven’t filed, you — But the reason I mentioned all the policies that I just talked about is that overall when you put my policies together in the budget, I want to cut taxes for more than 5 million middle-class families who need help paying for child care. I want to cut taxes for more than 8 million families of students who need help paying for college. I want to cut taxes to help 30 million workers save for retirement. I want to cut taxes for 13 million low-wage workers the same way that I fought to expand tax cuts like the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit — and we’ve been able to implement those.

So all told, my plan would cut taxes for 44 million working and middle-class families. That’s who our tax code should benefit — working Americans who are out there struggling every day, doing the right thing, supporting their families and trying to get a leg up in this new economy.

Now, it is a good thing that Republicans in Washington have started to talk about wages and incomes and the middle class. It’s better late than never, and so I’m encouraged. Unfortunately, the policies they’re putting forward don’t answer the mail — they don’t speak to the issues that ordinary families are facing.

I’ll just give you a couple examples. Their tax plan would give the average millionaire and billionaire a $50,000 tax cut. That’s about what the average middle-class worker makes in an entire year. They’re also pushing a new $270 billion tax cut for the very wealthiest of the wealthiest. It would affect about 5,000 families all across America; it would cost $270 billion. Here in North Carolina, it would benefit precisely 120 households.

For $270 billion, which is the cost approximately of the tax breaks I’m giving to 44 million people, it would benefit a little over 5,000 people.

So their plan would cut taxes for the top one-tenth of 1 percent and let taxes go up on 25 million working families and students. And my view is we don’t need tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

Republicans are doing their best to hide the facts behind their tax plan. They keep discussing tax fairness, which in GOPspeak means rich people should pay less while everyone else pays more. All of the Republican tax plans are the same. Taxes get cut for the wealthy and raised for everyone else. The plan is nothing new. The American people have caught on to it, but every year it comes back again.

Republicans try to dress it up as helping “job creators” or some vague definition of fairness, but at its core, it is the same plan that they have been trotting out for the last thirty years, and it every time that the trickle down tax plan was tried, it failed.

Democrats will be running on economic fairness and middle-class tax cuts in 2016. Tax plans like the one that Republicans are proposing make it almost too easy. Republicans have put it in writing. It’s clear whose interest they are looking out for, and it’s not the 99% who work the hardest but have the least.