Politics
Election 2012: Obama to make pitch on tax cuts
U.S. President Barack Obama (l) and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (r). PHOTO/File
Seeking an election-year fight over taxes, President Barack Obama is hitting the road to press Congress to extend tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners, framing a debate with Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans over tax fairness.
Obama was making his pitch Tuesday in Iowa, the state that launched his presidential bid in 2008. He faces a tough contest there against Romney this fall
Obama wants Congress to pass a one-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for households earning less than US$250,000 before they expire at the end of the year. Romney has pushed for an extension of cuts for all earners.
“This nation runs on economic freedom and we have to restore it,” Romney told radio host Michael Medved on Monday. “And to restore economic freedom we have to have taxes that are competitive with other nations.”
Obama sought to elevate the tax debate as one of the defining issues of the campaign, saying the outcome in the November election would determine the fate of the tax cuts for higher income earners. The White House and Obama’s campaign want to use the tax debate to portray congressional Republicans as obstructionists and Romney as a defender of the wealthy who is willing to push an across-the-board extension of the tax breaks at the expense of those earning more modest incomes.
“Let’s not hold the vast majority of Americans and our entire economy hostage while we debate the merits of another tax cut for the wealthy,” Obama said Monday at the White House.
Obama threatened to veto a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, saying in an interview with WWL-TV in New Orleans on Monday that a tax cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans would cost US$1 trillion over the next decade at a time when the nation needs to reduce the federal deficit.
