Becket Adams @ The Blaze:
A typical middle-income family making $40,000 to $64,000 a year could see its taxes go up by $2,000 next year if lawmakers fail to renew a lengthy roster of tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year, according to a new report Monday
Taxpayers across the income spectrum would be hit with large tax hikes, the Tax Policy Center said in its study, with households in the top 1 percent income range seeing an average tax increase of more than $120,000, while a family making between $110,000 to $140,000 could see a tax hike in the $6,000 range.
All told, the government would reap more than $500 billion in new revenue if a full menu of tax cuts were allowed to expire. The expiring provisions include Bush-era cuts on wage and investment income and cuts for married couples and families with children, among others. Also expiring is a 2 percentage point temporary payroll tax cut championed by President Barack Obama.
“It’s just a huge, huge number,” said Eric Toder, one of the authors of the study.
Economists warn that the looming tax hikes, combined with $109 billion in automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect in January, could throw the fragile economy back into (or deeper, depending on how you read the data) recession if Washington doesn’t act. The automatic spending cuts are coming due because of the failure of last year’s deficit “supercommittee” to strike a bargain. The combination of the sharp tax hikes and spending cuts has been dubbed a “fiscal cliff.”
It’s worth clicking on Read more for the second half of the article.
The “fiscal cliff” is almost certain to be an explosive issue during the presidential debates later this week. If either candidate handles a related question clumsily, it could be all over for him by the following morning.
I consider myself a fiscal conservative and I would “live with”, not like, the tax increases if I thought that our gov’t would make the needed adjustments to entitlement programs, drastically reduce the size of gov’t while keeping a very strong and robust military.
Problem is that I have no illusion our gov’t will do that under either President and will continue to spend money we simply don’t have. It is amazing the number of people, especially liberals, that no matter what kind of math you present them with, they do not see this as a spending problem. It’s a revenue problem to them and if you just stick it to the rich guys we can spend all the money we want and life will be good.
Unfortunately it appears we are going to do the same as some countries in Europe and wait until we have absolutely no choice but to make drastic reductions to everything so our people can riot in the streets over austerity cuts.