Congressional Race Reflects Political Divide over Tax Cut for Wealthy

A vote Wednesday in the U.S. House to extend Bush-era tax cuts and not drop the tax for people making more than $200,000 a year is drawing a line in the sand between Democrats and Republicans.

Freshman Republican Congressman Sean Duffy of Weston voted to extend the tax cuts, “My colleagues in the other party, they are not proposing tax increases to reduce the debt. They’re proposing tax increases to spend more money. They want to spend more!”

His Democratic challenger former state Sen. Pat Kreitlow of Chippewa Falls says by keeping the tax cut for the highest income earners, they’re not walking the deficit reduction walk, “So it’s nothing but hot air to talk about deficit reduction when you won’t vote for a non-partisan debt reduction package in order to protect tax breaks for the top 2%. That’s the wrong priority.”

Kreitlow says the vote just before the five week August recess begins means another congressional staring match, “Far and away the most likely scenario is that House Republicans, including Congressman Duffy, will keep this hostage situation going so that taxes go up for everybody when all they had to do was vote for the Senate bill that passed last week and middle class tax relief happens. End of story.”

Duffy says the best plan is to end all corporate tax loopholes and then reduce the corporate tax from 35% to 25%, “What we need to do is say ‘Listen, what we need to do is take away all these preferences. Remove them. And if you take away all the preferences, you can bring the top rate down from 35% to 25%. And if we do that, I look at our workforce, our ingenuity, our productivity, we will crush everybody.”

On this, Kreitlow agrees if as he puts it, House Republicans are serious.