Obama's Planned Tax Hikes

On February 4th of this year, the Congressional Budget Office submitted an analysis of the Democrats "stimulus" plan, and its expected effects on the economy. As you can read for yourself in the original document, they predicted the Obama Administration's stimulus plan would only deepen the recession:

...in the long run it will lower aggregate output (GDP) by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent.

The report overall is a very interesting read. How anyone could defend this "stimulus" boondoggle at all is completely baffling to me.

And now it seems, Obama is planning a big tax hike to pay for it. Here's the relevant clip from another Washington Post article:

Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, mainly by making good on his promise to eliminate some of the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. While the budget would keep the breaks that benefit middle-income families, it would eliminate them for wealthy taxpayers, defined as families earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule in 2011. That means the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the tax on capital gains would jump to 20 percent from 15 percent for wealthy filers and the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million would be maintained at the current rate of 45 percent.

In the teeth of a recession. With unemployment rising. Have these people even opened an economics text book?