White House economic advisers criticized Republican tax plans Monday in the first volley of President Obama’s efforts to gain an advantage on economic issues during Tax Week.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that the tax proposals in the congressional Republican budget plans and legislation to repeal the estate tax represented a “stark contrast in approach” with President Obama’s proposals. He criticized them as giveaways to wealthy people in the hopes that the benefits “trickle-down” to middle-class families.
White House officials particularly criticized House Republicans’ plans to pass a repeal of the estate tax this week that would cost the government $270 billion in lost revenue over 10 years while benefiting 5,500 families, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Instead of the estate tax repeal, Earnest said, “we can actually offer tax relief to 44 million working families” through the proposals included in Obama’s budget.
The GOP legislation set for a House vote this week, authored by Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, is “more regressive than the estate tax repeal that was passed under President Bush,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman said on a call with reporters Monday afternoon.
Republicans maintain that the death tax, as they call it, unfairly harms family-owned farms, ranches and small businesses, many of which are valuable enough to be subject to the tax but not large enough to pass unscathed by the 40 percent tax from generation to generation.
Cecilia Munoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, claimed that the estate tax repeal would benefit only 970 families in California, versus 2.5 million who would benefit from the second-earner tax credit included in the president’s budget.
The president is expected to talk about taxes throughout the week, criticizing Republican plans. The messaging push comes as the White House is engaged with members of both parties in Congress in talks on pursuing bipartisan tax reform.
Asked what the president was doing to advance those discussions, Furman said “the unfortunate thing has been the prioritization” of measures such as the death tax repeal.
There is “no reason that there shouldn’t be room for common ground here,” Furman said, “but in order for there to be common ground we need the priority to be about the middle class, not a fraction of the top 1 percent” of income earners.
