White House defends new tax proposals as GOP bashes plan

The White House went on the defensive Sunday over President Obama’s newly announced plans to hike taxes on the wealthy as Republican criticism over the proposals escalated.

Obama Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer defended his boss’s seemingly doomed proposal, saying that the White House “needed to double down on efforts to deal with wage stagnation and declining economic mobility.”

“The President's put forward a series of investments and tax relief for the middle class paid for by a very simple idea,” Pfeiffer explained on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It is the wealthy and the largest financial institutions and corporations who pay a little more.”

“We're going to make a case for it and we're going to see what we do,” he added. “If Republicans want to oppose (it), let them make their case to the country.”

Under the proposals, set to be a focal point of the President’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, capital gains taxes for couples making more than $500,000 a year would be raised to 28% from the current 23.8% level and tax a break that benefits the heirs of large inheritances, known as the “trust fund loophole,” would also be dismantled.

The plan would also levy a new tax on some of the country’s biggest financial firms — in particular, banks that have more than $50 billion in assets — designed to prevent risky lending practices.

Much of the revenue from the proposed changes would then be put toward tax credits that benefit middle class earners.

The policy ideas, long popular among liberal Democrats, are all but certain to be a bust with the new Republican majority in congress, a reality Pfeiffer seemed to partially acknowledge.

“Some of them are going to be legislative proposals Republicans may not love, but we'll push them on them. But a lot of them, some of them will be executive actions,” he said.

Republicans were mostly outraged by the announcement, with one prominent lawmaker calling the plan a “non-starter.”

“We’re not just one good tax increase away from prosperity in this nation,” Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We have to make sure that we get a regulatory environment that’s predictable, that we bring those tax rates down and that we quit spending this money that we don’t have.”

House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan’s spokesman, meanwhile, tweeted that the proposal was “not a serious plan.”

“We lift families up and grow the economy with a simpler, flatter tax code,” Paul spokesman Brendan Buck wrote, “not big tax increases to pay for more Washington spending.”