Small Businesses To Suffer From Obama’s Tax Hike

Ryan Donmoyer and Aliza Marcus
Bloomberg News
Thursday, February 26, 2009

Obama proposes spending $634 billion to overhaul the U.S. health-care system, partly paid for by limiting tax deductions for couples making more than $250,000 a year, an administration official said.

He will seek the money, to be spent over 10 years, in his first budget request to Congress today. About half would come from changes to Medicare, the health plan for the elderly, and the rest from the tax revisions, the official said. Limiting deductions for upper-income taxpayers is projected to generate $318 billion over 10 years, the official said.

Republican Reaction

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the No. 3 Republican leader in the House, said Obama can expect a wall of opposition to his proposed tax increase. Roughly half of Americans earning $250,000 are small-business owners, and the proposed increase will stifle the troubled economy, he said.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

“There will be overwhelming opposition from the American people and House Republicans to the idea that we should raise taxes during a recession,” Pence said in an interview. “Raising taxes in a recession is not a strategy for recovery.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said in an e-mail, “You cannot help the job seeker by punishing the job creator. This is exactly the wrong time to be raising taxes on anyone, not the least of which are our small businesses that create new jobs in America.”

Full story here.

Print this page.

Comment Rules

Comments are closed.