Republicans go after Obama’s expected tax proposals

Obama is scheduled to lay out principles for longer-term debt-reduction on Wednesday, with a framework that is expected to be markedly different than the House GOP’s 2012 budget proposal released last week.

On Sunday, Plouffe blasted that proposal, mainly crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), saying it would give tax cuts of $200,000 to the average millionaire and raise healthcare costs for the average senior. He also stressed that the president would continue to look to protect the middle class. Obama said in his February budget message that he was forced to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy so that middle-class taxpayers wouldn’t see an increase in their tax bills. 

“Seniors, the poor, the middle class, in the congressional Republican plan, are asked to bear most of the burden,” Plouffe said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” 

“If you weren’t giving enormous tax cuts to millionaires, you wouldn’t have to do that.”

But House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee – both of whom have praised the House GOP budget – have pushed back at the White House.

“Washington has a spending problem, [it] doesn’t have a revenue problem. And I think that we need to look at the spending side of this,” Boehner told Fox News on Monday, adding that he was “anxious” to hear the president’s remarks on the issue. “We’ve been waiting for months for the president to enter into this debate with us.”

And Sessions said in a Sunday statement that the president’s 2012 budget “the most irresponsible spending plan any President has ever put forward” and said that “another Washington-style tax-and-spend plan will not be acceptable.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee is also sending out releases linking certain House Democrats with the president’s tax proposals. 

Both the White House and the Ryan budget have called for tax reform. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner signaled last week that the administration was crafting its own plan to overhaul the corporate tax code.

The House Republican budget calls for lowering both the top corporate and individual tax rate to 25 percent, from the current 35 percent. It does not go into great detail on what tax loopholes should be filled to help pay for those lower rates, but does call for not allowing any of the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2013.