Will Rep. John Kline Continue To Cut Taxes For The Wealthiest 2%

Representative John Kline (R-MN-02), needs to make a decision... Will he be voting to continue to cut taxes on the wealthiest 2% while taxpayers pick up the tab, or will he allow them to pay their fair share like the rest of us?

The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of this year if Congress does nothing. Some of those tax cuts allow the wealthiest two percent of Americans to not pay their fair share like the rest of us. The theory was what they didn't pay in taxes would 'trickle down' to the rest of us in the way of more jobs, less costs, and magical wands we could wave during parades...but it hasn't worked and it won't ever work...

We have lots of independent studies that show there is no trickle down, just bigger windfalls for the greedy and less Americans able to work. Over a decade plus of 'trickle down' has show that reality is: Large companies making large profits that benefited fewer and fewer Americans.

Take for example any oil company operating in the United States, the larger ones made billions ($000,000,000) in profits but most didn't pay taxes. Exxon/Mobil paid zero (0) taxes in the United States for 2009. In spite of record profits for Corporations and incredible CEO pay increases, rest of us Americans declined in wealth substantially in wealth.

The price tag ($700 billion) for extending the Bush cuts for the wealthy is more than 16 times the cost of Obama’s infrastructure proposal. That $700 billion is what the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it would cost the Treasury to continue tax cuts for top earners over 10 years. That's a lot of taxpayers supporting the very wealthy and polls show a majority of Americans are against this.

Cutting the existing tax breaks for the wealthy (or letting them lapse back to pre-2001 level) would save billions of dollars and also pay for the middle class and poor to continue their tax breaks...

One of the most common objections to letting the cuts expire for those in the highest tax brackets is that it would hurt small businesses. As Rep. John Kline likes to point out often because facts don't matter, allowing the cuts to lapse would amount to a job-killing tax hike on small business....

But this often repeated Kline claim is false and misleading at best. If, as proposed, the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire for the highest earners, the vast majority of small businesses will be unaffected. Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets -- individuals earning more than about $170,000 a year and families earning more than about $210,000 a year.

According to the Washington Post: If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn't the way to go -- it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don't make most of their money off those businesses.

Voters will soon know if Rep. Kline represents them or just the wealthiest 2% of Americans by his vote on Bush's tax cuts as his 'hurt small business' argument is just more elitist manure.