President Barack Obama is looking to impose a new tax rate on people that make more than $1 million per year, which will be put in his proposal to deal with long-term deficit reductions, according to media reports.
An unnamed White House official told CNN that the Buffett Rule, which is named after multimillionaire Warren Buffett, will ensure that millionaires will pay at least the same proportion of taxes as middle-class Americans. The proposed tax was named after Buffett, who has long said that the United States needs to impose higher taxes on the very wealthy. Buffett has said the tax code unfairly charges wage earners a higher tax rate than those whose income comes more from investments than wages.
The official said that the rule would only affect 0.3 percent of Americans, or around 450,000 people.
High-level congressional Republicans panned Obama’s proposed tax on Sunday. In an interview with NBC’s "Meet the Press," Republican Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell said the tax is “a bad thing to do in the middle of an economic downturn.”
