Fairness for the Middle Class in the Ryan-Walden Tax Plan

While the Ryan-Walden budget cuts taxes for millionaires, it makes the middle class pay more. According to an analysis released by the House Budget Committee Democrats “The House Republican budget increases tax breaks for the wealthiest in the country at the expense of middle-income taxpayers, who will pay an average of $2,000 more per family.”  The Ryan-Walden budget predicts $7 trillion in deductions would be closed under his budget. The Center for American Progress found that “A total and complete repeal of all itemized tax deductions—the mortgage interest deduction, the charitable deduction, and the state and local tax deduction, for example—would generate less than $2 trillion in added revenue. Not only would that still leave him $5 trillion short of his claimed revenue levels, but he would also be financing a massive tax cut for the rich with a huge middle-class tax increase.”

Sure enough, we’ve seen this type of budget before – in the 2012 election. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, proposed a similar budget. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that: “Governor Romney adopted a similar approach in his presidential campaign, arguing that he would use unspecified tax expenditure savings to offset the cost of cutting the top income tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, or by 7 percentage points. Analysis by the Tax Policy Center indicated that Romney could not do that without raising taxes on middle class and working poor Americans. Yet now, Ryan proposes to cut the top rate by as much as 14.6 percentage points, or more than twice as much as Romney proposed, while still claiming to finance it through tax expenditure reforms that policymakers would identify later."

To sum it up, the Ryan budget that Congressman Walden plans to support simply has the wrong priorities for this country; we want to expand the middle class, not pad millionaires’ checkbooks.