President Obama's Weekly Address 2/2/13: A Balanced Approach to Growing the Economy in 2013

WASHINGTON, DC— In this week’s address, President Obama called on Congress to work together on a balanced approach to reduce our deficit and promote economic growth and job creation. Our businesses created 2.2 million jobs last year, and we just learned that our economy created more jobs over the last few months than economists originally thought. Our economy is poised to expand in 2013 if Washington politics doesn’t get in the way, and the President called on Congress to work together to keep moving us forward.

In Obama’s Plan to Tax Rich, $250,000 Figure May Mislead

Interesting read from the New York Times. It seems that the President's plan to raise taxes on those that earn $250K or more a year shouldn't be taken at face value.

President Obama’s insistence that marginal tax rates rise for families making more than $250,000 has convinced millions of affluent Americans that they are likely to be writing larger checks to the government next year.

But many of those families have no reason to fret.

A close look at the president’s plan shows that a large majority of families making up to $300,000 — as well as hundreds of thousands of families with even larger incomes — would not pay taxes at a higher marginal rate.

Because the complexity of the tax code makes it difficult to draw clean lines, they are the beneficiaries of choices the administration has made to ensure that families earning less than $250,000 do not pay higher rates.

Some of those affluent households would pay higher taxes next year under other parts of the president’s tax plan and increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act, but not under the centerpiece, the part most frequently promoted by the president and most bitterly opposed by Congressional Republicans.

John Boudreau, the president of a Connecticut construction firm who expects to make about $300,000 this year, said that was a welcome surprise. He voted for Mr. Obama and said he was ready to pay taxes at a higher rate. But he would rather not.

“I’m willing to, but if it works that I’m not, so be it,” he said. “I will not be a person that’s going to stick an extra check in my tax bill as my donation to my country.”

Unless the White House and Congress are able to reach an agreement, federal taxes are scheduled to rise sharply next year for a large majority of Americans. Tax cuts first passed in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush are scheduled to expire. So are cuts passed during Mr. Obama’s first term.

The president’s plan would prevent most of the scheduled increase for those below an income threshold Mr. Obama generally describes as $250,000. The Senate has passed similar legislation.

But Democrats remain at loggerheads with House Republicans, who want to prevent scheduled increases for the most affluent households, too. And the parties disagree about how to prune federal spending....

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Obama triggers tax fight

The Hill - Leading the News 
By Walter Alarkon and Sam Youngman

President Obama launched a high-stakes fight with big business Monday, calling for changes to the tax code that could raise taxes on U.S. multinationals by $210 billion.

Obama described the tax system as broken, adding that it is filled with loopholes written by corporate lobbyists that provide incentives for shipping jobs abroad.

“It’s a tax code full of corporate loopholes that makes it perfectly legal for companies to avoid paying their fair share,” Obama said.

The administration’s proposals could mean a tax hike of anywhere from 8 to 15 percent for U.S. corporations, on top of a base corporate tax rate that is already high for an industrialized country, said Clint Stretch, a tax expert for Deloitte Tax LLP.

“It doesn’t take some kind of rocket scientist to figure out that really can’t be very good for American businesses from a competitiveness point of view,” Stretch said.

The crackdown on corporate tax incentives is the latest move by the administration to squeeze big business. The president, who had taken heat from the left for continuing unpopular bank bailouts initiated by the Bush administration, has since called for restrictions on executive pay, the firing of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner and a reorganization of Chrysler that offered a better deal to unions than a collection of hedge funds and investment banks that owned debt from the troubled automaker.

The tax proposals are a frontal assault on U.S. multinational companies, which are expected to engage in an aggressive lobbying and public-relations campaign to fight them off.

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