Nia-Malika Henderson, national political reporter for The Washington Post, and Basil Smikle, Democratic strategist, join “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer to analyze President Obama’s newly proposed tax plan, which would involve extending a tax cut for the middle class, but ending a corresponding tax cut for those who make more than $250,000 per year. The Romney campaign criticized the move while holding a lucrative fundraiser for Romney in the Hamptons over the weekend.
Both Henderson and Smikle question the GOP’s assertion that letting the tax cut for the wealthy expire would hurt “job creators.” “We spend a lot of time talking about job creators — they haven’t created jobs in years,” Smikle says.
“A lot of these job creators are sitting on piles of cash. They aren’t hiring, they aren’t investing in research and development,” Henderson adds. She goes on to cite how under the Bush administration “the tax rate, of course, there, they lowered it; it was higher under Clinton. And 22 million jobs [were] created then, 3 million jobs created under Bush. So it doesn’t quite jibe, this whole idea that if you keep these tax rates low, that all of a sudden there’s going to be a flood of jobs created.”
