That would be – redistributing the wealth to the top 1%.

White House White Board: CEA Chair Austan Goolsbee Explains the Tax Cut Fight

Posted by Jesse Lee on September 30, 2010 at 06:30 AM EDT

…Austan Goolsbee, the new Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers here at the White House, tackles the tax cut fight and what it means that Congressional Republicans are “holding middle class tax cuts hostage” as the President has said…

*  Under President Obama’s plan,  all Americans would receive a tax cut on the first $250,000 of their income.  Every middle class family would receive the immediate certainty and comfort of knowing their tax cuts were permanently extended. Every American making more than $250,000 per year they would receive a tax cut on the first $250,000 of their income.

   * Instead of working to give middle class families this immediate certainty and comfort, Congressional Republicans are continuing to hold that relief hostage in order to have our nation borrow $700 billion that we can’t afford to provide an average tax cut of $100,000 to millionaires and billionaires.

   * We simply can’t afford to give the wealthiest Americans these big tax cuts that would add to our deficit and, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, be just about the least effective way to grow our economy and help create jobs.

The transcript:

Austan Goolsbee, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers: You may have been following, we’ve got a big back and forth going about the tax cuts. What I wanted to do today is just break it down real simple so you can understand exactly what the debate is about.

President George Bush passed tax cuts that will expire at the end of this year.

And what I’ve done here, is we got a ruler and measured out the size of the tax cut is how big the circle is by your income which is listed at the top from low incomes up to people make more than a million dollars a year.

Obama would preserve couple thousand dollars a year in tax cuts for virtually all Americans. And even for people make a lot, they’d get to keep the tax cut on the first two hundred fifty thousand dollars of their income.

Under the Republican plan, however, people making more than a million dollars a year, they’re gonna be getting a tax cut of more than one hundred thousand dollars.

That’s expensive. Giving these big red eggs to the very high income people would cost seven hundred billion dollars that we would have to borrow to give to them.

If you ask objective economists and analysts across the country about what is effective, you will find that everyone agrees that these giant tax cuts for very high income people are the least effective thing that we can do to get the economy growing.

And so what’s happening in Congress is that the people that want this [big tax breaks for the wealthiest] are saying nobody here [lower incomes] can get any of these tax cuts unless we agree to give this big red goose egg to the people making more than a million dollars a year. It doesn’t make any sense, it costs too much money, and we know it doesn’t work.

So simple and straightforward anyone who isn’t a Kool-aide drinker or Roy Blunt (r-lobbyists) can understand it.