With Republicans attempting to hold firm to their anti-tax platform, a group of millionaires advocating for higher taxes on the super rich visited Congress yesterday to urge super committee members and congressional leadership to reject any deal that doesn’t include such revenue increases.
The group, Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, planned visits to six super committee members, Tea Party representatives, Democratic leadership, and conservative anti-tax maven Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform. Among the millionaires’ top priorities is persuading Congress to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which blew a hole in the nation’s budget and left the country with unsustainable levels of debt, CNN Money reports:
“We want to pay more taxes,” said California millionaire Doug Edwards, a former marketing director for Google. “If you’re fortunate, and you make more than a million dollars a year, you ought to pay more taxes.” […]
“If the super committee bill doesn’t raise our taxes, we will ask our fellow citizens to consider killing the bill,” said Eric Schoenberg of Franklin Lakes, N.J., an adjunct professor of marketing at Columbia Business School.
Even as surveys have shown that millionaires support higher taxes on the rich, the GOP has remained opposed. The budget passed by the House earlier this year protected huge tax breaks for the wealthy even while gutting Medicaid and Medicare, and Republicans defended such tax cuts at town halls throughout the summer, even in the face of opposition from their constituents. Super committee co-chair Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) said the party will oppose a deal that includes “any penny” in tax increases, and even as a split emerges around the party’s staunch anti-tax advocacy, much of the party opposes raising taxes to help reduce the nation’s debt.
Instead of taxing those who can afford it, however, the GOP has unfortunately decided that the only tax increase it supports its one on the poorest Americans.