White House senior adviser David Plouffe made the rounds on Sunday-morning shows, and he promised that President Obama will continue to call for the wealthiest Americans to pay higher taxes and offer a long-term plan for deficit reduction, preparing for more spending battles ahead, on the heels of the last one. Plouffe said Obama will lay out parts of his economic plan in a speech scheduled for this week. “People like him, as he’ll say, who’ve been very fortunate in life, have the ability to pay a little bit more,” Plouffe said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“He has said he believes taxes on the higher income — people over $250,000 — should eventually go up. I think the president’s goal is to protect the middle class as we move forward.” Plouffe added some more party-line punches: “The Republican congressional plan that came out — they put some specific ideas out. They should be credited for that. There’s a couple in there we agree with. But the congressional Republican plan would give the average millionaire a $200,000 tax cut while asking more of the middle class. So we’re obviously not going to sign on with that approach.”
Later, on ABC’s This Week, the conversation took a highbrow turn, as Plouffe continued to prove that the budget battle hasn’t worn him out. “I hope [Donald Trump] keeps on rising [in the polls], because there’s zero chance that Donald Trump would ever be hired by the American people to do this job,” Plouffe said, of the headline-garnering maybe-presidential-hopeful. “There may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s a sideshow.”
