During his press conference on the debt ceiling negotiations today, Barack Obama mentioned that Democrats are not trying to raise taxes now, but in 2013.
What he didn’t say explicitly is that that is not merely a goal for the current negotiations, it’s also what will happen automatically under current law. The Bush tax cuts extended as part of the deal he made with Republicans at the end of last year will expire at the end of 2012. If Obama is reelected, he can allow those tax cuts to simply expire, and thereby raise the rates on all brackets without dealing with Republicans at all.
