By JIM KUHNHENN - Associated Press | AP – Sept. 18, 2011
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers.
A White House official said the proposal would be included in the president's proposal for long term deficit reduction that he will announce Monday. The official spoke anonymously because the plan has not been officially announced.
Obama is going to call it the "Buffett Rule" for Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained that rich people like him pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than middle-class taxpayers.
Buffett wrote in a New York Times op-ed （专栏版的） piece last month that he and his rich friends "have been coddled (溺爱) long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress."
The measure would be in addition to $447 billion in new tax revenue that Obama is seeking to pay for his short-term spending and tax cutting plan to jump start the economy.
House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday he would oppose tax increases to reduce the deficit. Boehner has urged Congress' deficit "supercommittee" to lay the groundwork for a broad overhaul (检查，革新) of the U.S. tax code (法规).
The panel has almost unlimited authority to recommend changes in federal spending and taxes and is working against a deadline of Nov. 23.
Boehner said the panel has "only one option, spending cuts and entitlement reforms," a reference to government benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Any broad compromise that clears the bipartisan (两党的, 两党连立的) committee is almost certain to require Democratic agreement to savings from programs such as Social Security and Medicare, along with Republican acquiescence (默许) to additional revenues, although any such trade-offs (交换, 协定, 交易, 平衡) are rarely discussed openly until the last possible moment in negotiations.
Obama's new tax proposal was first reported by the New York Times.