Who says bipartisanship is dead?

[Hannah Bell]

The tax compromise passed in December has been hailed everywhere as a payroll tax cut combined with an extension of the Bush tax cuts, despite the fact that it raised taxes on a third of Americans. The killing of Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit, which the White House called the biggest middle-income tax cut ever, and the replacement of it with the Republicans' payroll tax cut raised taxes on single workers whose wages come to $20,000 or less and married couples with less than $40,000 in wages. That's 51 million taxpayers, the Tax Policy Center estimated. (See Table T10-277.)

Among the poorest fifth of tax units, whose annual cash income is less than $17,878, two-thirds got hit with a tax increase. On average, their taxes went up $134, which is 1.3 percent of this group's total cash income.

Consider a single worker who makes $6,000. That was the average wage of the bottom third of workers in 2009, the Medicare tax database shows. Killing the Making Work Pay credit in favor of the payroll tax cut amounted to a tax increase of $252, or 4 percent of total income.

Looked at another way, some workers will labor for 23 days this year and next just to pay increased taxes.

The pattern of the Republican-Obama tax plan is a clear stepladder in which the more you make, the more you benefit, and the less you make, the more you pay. This is a form of socialism: upward redistribution to enrich those at the top.

http://tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8E3J74?OpenDocument

[MannyGoldstein]

1. I'm proud that an adult conversation was had

And a tough choice made for shared sacrifice.

Now pass Barack the foie gras, he needs his energy for more tough choces against the bottom 98%.

[BzaDem]

2. What's unbelievable is that there are actually people that supported the expiration of

ALL of the tax cuts for the poor. They would be perfectly fine with the government taking thousands of more dollars from families at the poverty line, so long as we could get the marginal rate on the rich to go up now.