Carney: Biden didn’t signal tax change

The White House said Friday that Vice President Biden didn’t announce any tax policy changes during Thursday’s debate, when Biden discussed how millionaires would benefit from an extension of all Bush-era tax rates.

Press Secretary Jay Carney stressed at his daily briefing that Biden was just using taxpayers that make at least $1 million as an example, and that President Obama has not moved from his stance that current rates should expire for family income above $250,000 a year. 

“Our position on the Bush tax cuts has not changed,” Carney said. 

“The president proposed a way to ensure that 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of businesses do not see their taxes go up at the beginning of next year, and that’s a goal the vice president reiterated throughout the debate last night.”

Still, Biden’s invoking of the $1-million threshold comes after it took Democrats much of the current Congress to unite behind the $250,000 figure.

Republicans have said that they want to extend all current rates for a year, and then broadly overhaul the tax code in 2013.

{mosads}As Carney noted Friday, the president has backed the $250,000 threshold since 2007, the year the then-Illinois senator began his first run for the White House. 

Democrats in Washington eventually did coalesce behind the president’s favored cutoff, and the Senate passed a bill in July that increased taxes on family income above $250,000 a year.

But before then, leading congressional Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) had expressed support for the $1 million cutoff. 

Other Democrats who represent states like California and New York, where living expenses can be higher, backed that threshold as well. Some Democrats have also said in the past that the $1 million figure could be a natural compromise, between extending all rates and the $250,000 cutoff. 

During Thursday’s debate with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Biden said more than once that those making $1 million and up annually would get an extra $800 billion if Bush-era rates were extended.

An Obama campaign official said Friday that Biden was getting that figure by combining both the expiring Bush rates, and the current estate tax parameters, which also lapse at the end of the year.

According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, households making $1 million and above get 77.4 percent of the benefits from extending the high-end Bush rates and the current estate tax parameters. 

The campaign also says that, using figures from the president’s 2013 budget, extending current tax policies for the highest earners would cost $968 billion over a decade. Combining those two figures together comes out to roughly $750 billion.  

On Friday, Carney said that Biden’s use of the statistics for million-dollar households just proved that the vice president had command of the facts.

“He was using a million dollars as an example,” Carney said. 

“And he made clear that he knew his brief, because of the trillion dollars in that tax cut, 80 percent goes to households over one million dollars. And that’s the point he was making.”