MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“A modest tax increase on the wealthy is not going to break their backs” said Obama

Obama has long opposed extending the Bush-era tax cuts for earnings above 250.000 dollars a year

President Obama has reiterated his call for high earners in the US to pay more in taxes, in his first news conference since winning re-election. He called for quick legislation to rule out tax rises on the first 250.000 dollars of income, but refused to extend cuts for the wealthiest 2%.

“We should not hold the middle class hostage while we debate tax cuts for the wealthy,” Mr Obama said.

The US faces an end-of-year “fiscal cliff” of spending cuts and tax rises. The fiscal cliff would see the George W Bush-era tax cuts expire in combination with automatic, across-the-board reductions to military and domestic spending.

Some 607bn of savings and tax rises are planned, including reductions in the defence budget, the end of an employee tax holiday, changes to Medicare allowances and higher personal taxes.

The lower paid are set to lose some child and income credits, but Mr Obama has made fewer references to other portions of the stimulus deal set to expire beyond the tax cuts.

The fiscal cliff is due to take effect because Congress failed to reach a deal on deficit reduction after a stand-off over the US debt ceiling in mid-2011.

Congressional Republicans have said since last week's US elections that they are open to raising revenue through tax reform and closure of loopholes, but oppose tax rises on the wealthy.

Glenn Hubbard, an economic adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's failed presidential bid, writing in the Financial Times, called on fellow Republicans to accept the need for the rich to pay more tax, albeit through closing loopholes such as tax deductions.

Other Republicans favour ending the right of Americans to deduct mortgage interest payments from their taxable income, something analysts say is likely to hurt the middle classes far more than top earners.

During his news conference on Wednesday, Mr Obama was dismissive of a loophole-only reform, telling reporters that “the math tends not to work” in helping to cut one trillion dollars in the US deficit. “It really is arithmetic, not calculus,” he said.

The president has long opposed extending the Bush-era tax cuts for earnings above 250.000 dollars a year, but gave into Republican demands in 2010 when the cuts were last up for renewal.

On Wednesday, Mr Obama said that would not happen this time.

“A modest tax increase on the wealthy is not going to break their backs,” he said. “They'll still be wealthy.”

But the president said he was confident that the White House and Congress could reach a deal before 1 January to avoid the “fiscal cliff”, as the US economy could not afford it coming to pass.

He suggested the immediate extension of all the expiring tax cuts except the top rate, followed by a more comprehensive reform of the tax code as well as some of the US' largest benefits programmes, including Social Security, in 2013.

In doing so, he distanced himself from some in his own party who want the combined tax rises and cuts to happen, in order to give Mr Obama a better negotiating position.

On Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned against extending all of the tax breaks that are due to expire in January as a way of giving Washington more time to broker a deal on the deficit. Geithner claimed doing this would create more uncertainty in the financial markets.