Yesterday, the Senate narrowly voted (51-48) to raise taxes on 1.2 million small businesses, which will likely kill more than 700,000 jobs at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Jim Webb (D-VA) joined all Republicans in bipartisan opposition to the tax hike.
This is President Obama’s economic plan. This is what he asked Congress to do. And he recently told a fundraising crowd that his economic plan has been working.
“Just like we’ve tried [Republicans’] plan, we tried our plan—and it worked,” he said.
But Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, said yesterday that “the economy is not growing fast enough,” acknowledging that “unemployment is very high.” “The institutions with authority should be doing everything they can to try to make economic growth stronger,” he said.
The President’s plan, now endorsed by the Democratic majority in the Senate, has little chance of going anywhere in the House of Representatives. But it has put the 51 Senators who want to raise taxes on record.
Perhaps the biggest lie in the tax debate is that this vote affects only “the rich.” That’s simply not true. Many small businesses, known as flow-through businesses, pay their taxes through the individual income tax. Ernst and Young estimates that these types of businesses “employ 54% of the private sector work force.” This tax hike squarely hits 1.2 million of these businesses that hire workers and have incomes above $200,000.
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