One of his many promises about which Obama has repeatedly gone out of his way to be “perfectly clear,” as he emphasized in his State of the Union Address, is that
if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.
If he intends to keep this promise he will have to veto any final health care that resembles the bill on the way out of the Senate Finance Committee, for as Senator Orrin Hatch has just pointed out, a massive tax increase on un-rich Americans was just added to that bill.
The proposal, added as part of a last-minute package of modifications to Chairman Max Baucus’ bill, would increase the threshold for deducting medical expenses from today’s level of 7.5 percent of income to 10 percent. This seemingly small change is projected by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation to cost taxpayers over $4 billion per year….
Of the almost 15 million families affected by this change, only 78,000 have incomes of more than $200,000. The other 99.5 percent of the victims of this tax hit would be below that figure, with many of them being far from wealthy. In fact, more than 62 percent of the taxpayers affected by this change make less than $75,000 per year.
That’s 40 billion dimes per year, 400 billion in a decade.
