Pfeiffer: President’s State of the Union Plan Will ‘Absolutely Not’ Pass

The CBS host began, “Let’s just start with what the president and the White House said overnight. The president is going to announce a plan in the State of the Union to raise $320 billion in new taxes on the wealthy. That is over ten years, capital gains taxes are going up with this new revenue. He is going to do such things as provide free community college and so forth for people, new tax breaks for working families, increase childcare credit. I would just ask you this, Mr. Pfeiffer, do you in any way, shape, or form believe that a new Republican Congress is going to do what a Congress that had Democrats and Republicans in control would not do? I mean, is this for real? Do you really think there is a chance that something like this could pass?”

“Well,” Pfeiffer responded, “I think this plan the president is going to talk about on Tuesday night goes to what is the core theme of the State of the Union, which is middle class economics and it’s the simple proposition that now that the economy is in a stronger place than it has been in a very long time we need to double down on our efforts to deal with wage stagnation and declining economic mobility. And so the simple proposition that we should ask the wealthy to pay a little more and invest more in the middle class, and give the middle class a raise.

“Now there are elements of our plan that Republicans have supported in the past, higher education tax breaks, they are something very similar to what the Republican House passed last year, the fee on large financial institutions is something very similar to what was included in the Republican corporate tax reform plan last year by Republican Dave Camp.

“So are they going to agree on everything? Absolutely not.

“But I think we should have a debate in this country between middle class economics and trickle down economics and see if we can come to an agreement on the things we do agree on.”