New Poll Shows More Favor Letting Tax Cuts For Top Earners Expire

A new Gallup poll out today reveals that more Americans would support allowing tax cuts for the nation’s most wealthy individuals to expire at the end of the year.

44% of those surveyed said the tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration should be renewed next year for people making less than $250,000 per year, but not for those making more than that. Comparatively, 37% said they would vote to keep the tax cuts in place for all taxpayers. 15% said they would allow all the tax cuts to expire.

The debate in Washington this fall promises to center around the issue of what to do about the tax cuts. President Barack Obama has made it clear that he supports raising taxes on the top two percent of Americans, while keeping in place tax cuts for all other income earners. The Obama administration believes that doing so would generate $700 billion in revenue.

Republicans, however, have unitedly called for extending the cuts for all. According to House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), “this would help ease the uncertainty employers and entrepreneurs are facing so they can get back to creating jobs.”

The Gallup poll indicates that views on what to do about the tax cuts fall generally along partisan lines. Among those who said they would vote to extend the complete package of cuts, 54% identified themselves as Republican, compared to just 18% who said they were Democrats. Meanwhile, 60% of Democrats that were surveyed said they favored eliminating the cuts for the wealthy. 32% of Republicans who responded agreed.

Congress will likely take up the issue when it returns to session next week, but immediate action is not expected. The struggle over what to do could take weeks, especially with most lawmakers looking ahead to the November elections. Though the president will continue to call for swift legislation, the White House seems to be acknowledging the ideological battle that will surely occur on Capitol Hill. Just this week, recently resigned OMB Director Peter Orszag urged lawmakers to extend the entire package of cuts.

“[T]he best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether,” he wrote in an editorial featured in the New York Times. “Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.”