This email came from Vice President Joe Biden:
I’ll cut to the chase: If Congress doesn’t act soon, middle-class Americans will see their taxes go up starting on January 1st, taking almost $1,000 out of the pockets of a typical family next year.
Last year, President Obama and members of both parties in Congress cut the payroll tax for 155 million workers, putting money in your pockets. Now, that tax cut is expiring. So in September, the President and I proposed extending that tax cut and cutting your taxes even further: giving the typical family a $1,500 tax cut. Steps like this won’t just help families feel more secure in their budgets, it’ll give them more money to spend at local businesses that will hire more people and make investments in new equipment too.
We thought the extension would win bipartisan support again. How could Republicans in Congress, some of whom have pledged not to raise taxes by a penny, oppose extending the same tax cuts they just passed? But after years of protecting expensive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, many Republicans now say we should let this middle-class tax cut expire.
The answer to Biden’s question in the last paragraph, is that some — not all — Republicans now oppose extending the payroll tax cut because they perceive it as a temporary measure at a time when permanent tax reform is called for. Regardless, this is probably the highest card that the Obama team had to play: because the Republicans scuttled the supercommittee, your taxes are going up in the very near future.
