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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Obama Expected to Extend|Tax Cuts for Middle-Class

WASHINGTON (CN) - President Obama will announce a plan this afternoon to extend middle-class tax cuts in order to jump-start the sluggish economic recovery, according to the White House press office. He is expected to let Bush-era tax cuts expire for wealthy Americans.

White House officials say Obama will unveil his tax plan today in an address at a Cleveland community college.

"Anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well, hoping that it's going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up, you'll never see it," Obama said in Milwaukee on Monday.

"That's not how America was built," he said. "We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. ...We did it on the assembly line and at the construction site."

During his speech Monday, Obama unveiled a $50 billion infrastructure plan for updating roads, bridges, dams and levees and building an electric grid. The plan calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, building and maintaining 4,000 miles of railroads, and restoring 150 miles of airport runway. The plan also includes setting up an infrastructure bank to manage project funding.

White House officials said Obama's speech Wednesday afternoon will introduce other economic recovery initiatives. It is partly a response to an address given by House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, in Cleveland last month, in which he called for Obama to demand the resignations of the remaining members of his economic team. Boehner also asked for Congress to cut government spending and drop certain tax hikes.

During an interview today on ABC's "Good Morning America," Boehner said, "The American people are asking the question, 'where are the jobs?,' and yet here's the White House worrying about what I've got to say instead of working together to get our economy going again and to get jobs back in America."

Boehner called for a two-year freeze on current tax rates. Republicans argue that letting upper-class tax cuts expire would hamper business growth and delay job creation.

The nationwide unemployment rate has hovered around 9.6 percent all summer.

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