Budget Fact Check: Tax Cuts
03/17/2009
TAX CUTS
Partisan attacks claim that President Obama's budget will raise taxes on America's families…
In fact, the President's budget cuts taxes for 95 percent of America's workers and their families.
The President's budget:
- Makes permanent the $800 "Making Work Pay" tax cut while preserving all dedicated payroll taxes that go to Social Security and Medicare. This is a new tax cut President Obama promised in his campaign.
- Expands the Child Tax Credit helping millions of families with children.
- Makes the $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent to make college more affordable. This is a new tax cut President Obama promised in his campaign.
- Permanently protects millions of middle-class families from being hit by the alternative minimum tax.
- Expands the Earned Income Tax Credit by providing tax relief to families with three or more children and increasing marriage penalty relief.
- Provides for automatic enrollment in IRAs and 401(k)s and expands the current tax credit for saving for retirement.
- Eliminates capital gains on small businesses.
The President's budget will not:
- Increase taxes for families making less than $250,000 a year.
The Obama Budget:
- Cuts taxes (for 95 percent of American workers)
- Cuts spending (non-defense discretionary - over 10 years - to its lowest level as a percent of the economy in nearly half a century)
- Cuts the deficit (in half over four years)
- Grows nothing but jobs
- Ends an era of irresponsibility and gimmicks
Creating American Jobs means:
- Making quality health care affordable
- Powering our economy with clean American energy
- Modernizing our education system
We can't afford to wait. Failure to reform and invest produced eight years of the slowest job growth in three quarters of a century.