When President Barack Obama met with progressive and labor leaders Tuesday he said that he is committed to making sure the tax rates for high-income earners rises to the levels that occurred prior to George W. Bush taking office.
“I am not going to budge,” Obama said, according an anonymous source from the meeting who spoke with the Huffington Post. “I said in 2010 that I’m going to do this once, and I meant it.”
There were two other anonymous sources who confirmed the quote from the first source.
“It was a very, very positive meeting,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “We’re very committed to making sure that the middle class and workers don’t end up paying the tab for a party that we didn’t get to go to, and the president is committed to that as well.”
The president for the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden, said, “The president was really standing firm on taxes. Everyone in the room talked about how much they have the president’s back in this fight.”
The Bush tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire soon, are one part of the budget deal that has to be agreed upon before the country hits the fiscal cliff. The original unnamed source from the meeting said that Obama “seemed to agree that Social Security should not be included in a bargain because it didn’t add to the deficit.”
The president of AFSCME, Lee Saunders, was also in attendance for the meeting. Saunders made it known that the members of his group will be as dedicated to pressuring the Republicans to agree to a balanced debt deal as they were during the campaign season when it comes to energy.
“We’re going to have our folks engaged, just like they were in the election,” Saunders said. “They’re going to be engaged in this campaign.”