President Obama, joined by Vice President Joe Biden and White House staff, called on the highest-income earners to pay more taxes. (Getty Images/Mark Wilson)
President Obama, in his first public statement since being re-elected on Tuesday, reiterated his campaign plank to seek a tax increase on Americans who earn more than $250,000 a year as a way to help close the federal government’s budget deficit.
But after his remarks to the White House press corps, Obama broke tradition and became the first president in four decades to not take a single reporter’s questions following a post-election address. Since Ronald Reagan cruised to a second term in 1984, all presidents who have been re-elected took a bevy of questions that hinted at plans for their second terms.
In the roughly eight-minute speech, Obama said that his comfortable margin of victory—332 electoral votes to Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s 206—signifies that voters would like the government to raise income taxes on the highest earners while maintaining existing rates on people who make less than $250,000.
“If we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue—and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes,” Obama said.
The George W. Bush-era tax cuts that were extended at the end of 2010 are scheduled to expire at the end of the year; at the same time, a budget-cutting plan passed in 2011 is set to go into effect with sweeping, automatic cuts to nearly every government department unless Congress and the White House agree on a deficit-reduction bill to avoid a so-called “fiscal cliff.”
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has been a little cagey on raising government revenue. While he said on Wednesday that he would be open to increasing the federal coffers, he said in an interview with ABC News today that he considers raising taxes “unacceptable.”
Obama today invited Boehner and other congressional leaders to the White House next week to begin negotiating a solution to the “fiscal cliff.”
But Obama’s decision to avoid reporters’ notebooks today is a surefire oddity. Reagan, Bill Clinton and Bush all gave lengthy press conferences in the days after their re-elections. By skipping from the podium, BuzzFeed notes, Obama became the first president since Richard Nixon to avoid answering post-election questions.
