| President Obama to propose middle class tax cut at State of the Union | President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address Tuesday to call on Congress to fund a series of tax cuts for the middle class by raising taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers and largest financial institutions, senior administration officials announced Saturday.
+ The proposal includes tax credits for middle-class families and students, including a new tax break for two-earner families, a tripling of the child tax credit and expanded education tax breaks that would affect 8.5 million families and students.
+ Funding for Obama's proposed reforms would come from closing a "trust fund loophole" that benefits the wealthiest Americans, raising the top capital gains and dividend rate back to 28% and reforming financial sector taxation.
+ Altogether, the new tax benefits for middle-class families would cost $175 billion over 10 years, according to the administration. This is on top of the $60 billion price tag for Obama's proposed plan to make community college tuition free for two years for millions of American students.
+ Will this actually happen? Probably not: As the New York Times notes, the administration's tax proposal faces "long odds" in the Republican-controlled Congress, led by lawmakers "who have long opposed raising taxes and who argue that doing so would hamper economic growth at a time the country cannot afford it."
+ Republicans are already voicing their opposition: "The president needs to stop listening to his liberal allies who want to raise taxes at all costs and start working with Congress to fix our broken tax code," Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Senate's top tax law writer, told Reuters. | | | Greek police detain head of Belgian terror cell as European dragnet intensifies | Greek authorities detained four terrorism suspects in multiple raids on Sunday, including a man believed to be the ringleader of a Belgian jihadi cell, in a continued increase in anti-terrorism operations by European authorities in the aftermath of the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
+ A Greek police official told the AP that the four were arrested separately in Athens and included a man who matches the description of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a man who may be linked to the jihadi cell that was dismantled in the the Belgian city of Verviers on Thursday.
+ On Friday, French, German, Belgian and Irish police arrested more than two dozen suspects in anti-terrorism raids, including 13 more people detained in Belgium and two in France in connection with the Verviers firefight.
+ Charlie Hebdo's current editor chastised the media for blurring out the newspaper's cover in the wake of the terror attack.
+ Meanwhile, Muslims protested the new cover's depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in nearly a dozen countries, including a demonstration in Niger that claimed five lives and two churches.
+ This New York Times report on how the two brothers in the Charlie Hebdo shooting went from amateurs to jihadis is a must-read. | | | | |
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